


Forgot In Cruel Happiness

by Juliet_Anders



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Fire Nation Imperialism, Florida Woman: the OC, Foggy Swamp waterbenders, Iroh backstory, Ocean descriptions, Sailing, freediving, sea life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:09:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 62,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24109510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Juliet_Anders/pseuds/Juliet_Anders
Summary: In an age when every known Southern waterbender has been taken prisoner by the Fire Nation, a storm at sea forces the crown prince to rely on a waterbender who isn't from the north or the south. Iroh learns to freedive, which will be useful to his nephew in 40 years, and fails entirely to learn other things that would have been useful at the time.An Iroh backstory fic taking place 60 years into the Hundred Year's War. Mysteries to be solved include: how Zuko knew how to freedive into the Northern Water Tribe. How Iroh learned how to sail out of it. The invention of lightning redirection. How the hunt for the Last Dragon went down. What the worst possible combination of two animals could be.
Relationships: Iroh (Avatar)/Original Female Character
Comments: 25
Kudos: 32





	1. They Kiss on the Ring, I Carry the Crown

Forgot In Cruel Happiness  
By Juliet Anders

A/N: The end of season 1, when Zuko dives into the Northern Water Tribe, got my imagination going. Freediving is my favorite thing to do and I cared a little too much about figuring out how Zuko learned the specialized skill of deep diving and extended breath holding, which meant figuring out how Iroh learned it, because obviously Iroh taught him.

I'm also using this story to tell a lot of my headcanon regarding Iroh's backstory. He's always been my favorite A:TLA character, and I'm interested in the tragedy and horror of the length of time he maintained the cognitive dissonance to lead a war on a culture he liked while having empathy and good people skills. You can probably guess already that this story doesn't have a happy ending, but there's going to be humor and fun on the way down.

Also you just have to accept my hypothesis that Iroh in his youth was a whole damn meal in order to read this story. It's rated M for a reason.

I'm not a fan of the comics or the supplemental material that we got for the A:TLA world and characters, so if anything I write in this contradicts those, I know, and I did it on purpose. We'll cross those bridges in author notes when we get to them.

The story begins 60 years into the 100 Years War. Iroh is somewhere in his mid-late 20's, Ozai is about 5, Fire Lady Ilah has been dead for about 2 years, and the hunt for the Last Dragon has already happened. Our story begins on the mainland Earth Kingdom, but we won't stay there very long.

The title of this story is taken from a poem by W.B. Yeats. The chapter title is from the song The Man, by The Killers.

~~~~

Chapter 1

Iroh had become accustomed to taking his morning tea overlooking the river. The floating bridge the engineers were building was already a marvel, even three-quarters done. Iroh could have sworn his second sight saw the bridge already completed, linking the road from Fort Iruka to the Guang-hua mines, ghostly carts of coal rolling back over the river to burn in Fire Nation ships instead of Earth Kingdom forges. The future was already so real that he might as well be looking at it.

And it was so pleasant to look upon in the honey-warm light of the summer morning sun, rising over the great rolling mountains that surrounded the Leijiang river valley, to shine on rows and rows of Fire Nation soldiers’ tents. He barely even had to step out of his tent on the hill to observe the camp, nearly silent as the night guards changed their shifts and the engineers awoke to use the daylight. Soon the valley would be alive with the noise of industry and soldiers drilling, but for now, the river valley was at peace.

The hilltop where his tent had been pitched afforded Iroh some privacy from the men below for these morning meditations. He could have greeted the sun as disheveled as a common enlisted man, felt the sun on his bare shoulders perhaps as it peeked over the mountains, and barely anyone would have seen. But it wouldn’t have done for any of them to glance upward and see their executive officer less than fully suited for the day, so he greeted each morning in full uniform, groomed without the assistance of enlisted men, and made his tea himself, over the river, before the mountains, beneath the brightening sky.

Every morning of this calmer face of conquest brought a lightness to his spirit after the brutal slog that had been their taking of the river. Turning back the Northern Water Tribesmen from the road south to Leijiang had cost them good men, but the northern barbarians had given up once the army made its way south instead of further East, where the Water Tribe had Earth Kingdom allies to defend. Now his scouts reported regularly that no Earth Kingdom troops had been mobilized in defense of the mine, nor was the Fire Nation’s engineering discussed in the nearby towns. They had captured every rogue Earth Kingdom traveler who discovered their operation. They still had surprise on their side. The mine was all but theirs. All but his, the first truthful conquest he’d have to speak of to his father.

Certainly, public credit for now would go to the lieutenant-colonel who was technically the commanding officer of the battalion, but the CO was among the few who knew Iroh for who he was, and not simply a major young enough for his career to be speculated about. If any of the junior officers complained at not recalling him from the Academy, or tried to guess at the importance of his family, or even dared to whisper accurately of his lineage, they had the sense not to do it where the Dragon of the West could hear. 

He’d laid the skull of the last dragon at Fire Lord Azulon’s feet. That was enough to earn a young man an executive officer’s position.

The lieutenant-colonel served technically as his second, but the captain who served publicly as the same knew his birthright as well. He spied that captain out of the corner of his eye ascending the hill to his tent, an unsealed message fresh from a messenger hawk in-hand.

“Good morning, Jeong Jeong,” he greeted. “Have you had your tea yet?”

“A message came for you, _sir_ ,” the captain responded, with the trace of irony he only ever let slip when no other soldier was nearby. Jeong Jeong was never happy to call him by a title other than “Prince.” But he did it, happily or not, and what was that if not loyalty?

“You can tell it to me seated. Don’t you think this sunrise wants company?” Iroh asked, gesturing to the light blooming behind the round black mountains, the puffy clouds as pink as flowers.

Jeong Jeong ignored the offer, lifting the unsealed message. “It’s about the voyage, back to the Capital for the Anniversary,” he pressed. “Direct from the Tephra.” 

He’d backed his urgency up effectively. Iroh left off filling the captain’s cup. “Is the ship delayed?” It could only be so, for a message to come from the ship that had been slated to take him back to the Fire Nation for a trip prepared years in advance.

“I’m afraid it is,” Jeong Jeong said, handing over the message with a frown so anxious he might actually be feeling fear. “The Tephra met with an Earth Kingdom warship.”

Iroh took the scroll. “Oh?”

“In shallow water.”

Iroh didn’t bother to finish unrolling the scroll. “Oh.”

“It will be in drydock at least a month,” Jeong Jeong clarified. “We’ll have to find other passage to the Fire Nation.”

“The Citrine is on patrol in the Colonies,” Iroh remembered. “It should be a simple matter to charter a ship there.”

A Gem class ship was not nearly as ostentatious as one of the Volcano classes. It wouldn’t appear nearly as impressive sailing through the Gates of Azulon for the ceremonial return parade, but war demanded flexibility.

“Which of the men knows Earth Kingdom vessels best?” Iroh asked, standing up with his unfinished tea.

“There are men who enlisted from the colonies in the 55th.”

“Pick a whichever Colonial soldier can tell you the most about sailing ships,” Iroh decided. “We’ll have to pare down the number of guards that come with us. We shouldn’t travel in more than a group of five.”

“ _Sir,_ ” Jeong Jeong said, with some force, always as if he were trying to convey the meaning of _Prince_ without being able to say it. “We can’t travel through lands this hostile without a full royal guard.”

“We can, and we’re about to,” Iroh insisted. “A royal guard would attract a royal quantity of attention. We’ll remain undercover at least to the Colonies. Select an appropriate guard for the arrival there, Captain. Until we’re back on Fire Nation soil, I continue to be safest anonymously.”

He worked to contain his grin. A little more time in the anonymity of his own merit was a much more pleasant prospect than he’d expected to begin his morning with. Certainly it would be nice to return to the adulation his citizens gave him for nothing but being born, but there was so much pleasure to be found in traveling as a common soldier, and finding out that even without his title, people liked him plenty. “Cheer up, Captain,” he said, as Jeong Jeong clearly struggled with the respectful politics of not disobeying all the direct orders he’d just been given. “A voyage by sail will be as good as leave after all this battle.”

“I get seasick on anything smaller than a Gem class,” Jeong Jeong admitted, sounding preemptively miserable.

“Then we’ll be certain to find the most stable vessel the Earth Kingdom has to offer,” Iroh said, no longer bothering to restrain his grin. “I could justify no lesser expense for the health and safety of my personal guard.”

~~~~

The road past the Guang-hua mine south to the Earth Kingdom port of Turtleray Bay was too conspicuous to risk, but a goatboar path up and over a nearby mountain cut the journey short a day anyway. The rivet valley, full of yellow and purple flowers, smelled far sweeter than a camp full of fighting men, and the sounds of construction were not missed once replaced by the men’s companionable laughter. If the enlisted men suffered nerves over traveling with their executive officer, they got over them after the first day’s walk. If they speculated about why a mere major would be summoned to the Fire Nation for the 60th anniversary of Sozin’s Comet when their commanding officer was not, they kept those speculations to themselves.

The band of six - three additional enlisted men had turned out to be too few for Jeong Jeong’s anxiety - consisted of their quartermaster, Huaji, a middle-aged sergeant who knew how to provision a journey by foot with barely a moment to plan it, and three infantrymen. Loto, a private from the colonies, had volunteered information about every sort of boat from a vinta to a tongkang (whatever those were). Gen and Saburo served as royal guards without being told their charge was royal. The corporals both specialized daily in humbling their fellow soldiers, enlisted and officers alike, at close combat drills.  
Jeong Jeong admitted to liking the men but his tension increased as the end of their week’s walk drew close, until he was snapping even at polite young Loto, at which point Iroh could not help but pull him aside for a conversation the men should not hear.

“You’re not excited to return home,” he pointed out, when the evening’s camp had been made and Jeong Jeong sat meditating, an open flame burning continuously and erratically in his upturned palms. The captain cracked an eye as the prince sat beside him, and since he could not possibly snap at his future Fire Lord, he let his flame burn out with an exhale. “Don’t tell me some trouble awaits you,” Iroh teased, at Jeong Jeong’s discontent. “Did you leave a woman scorned? A rival with an insult to settle? Will I get first row seats to the Agni Kai?”

“It is nothing, sir.” Jeong Jeong exhaled. “I just don’t look forward to the end of nights like these." 

Stars glittering into the endless sky everywhere they turned their eyes, and the rushing of the river rose up from the black valley below.

“I am ashamed that I showed enough unhappiness that you thought to ask,” Jeong Jeong admitted. “You must have mixed feelings about returning home again.”

He chose his words carefully, saying by NOT saying what he meant. That Iroh must not have been excited to return to the Fire Nation for the first time since the Fire Lady died.

“It will be bittersweet,” Iroh admitted, touched that Jeong Jeong thought to ask, pausing as he still did these days, thinking of his mother. “But what better homecoming than for a celebration? Perhaps my younger brother is even old enough to hold a decent conversation by now.”

“The celebration will be glorious,” Jeong Jeong agreed. “But I’m not made for court life. Out here, at least I’m doing something with myself besides minding my manners and being careful not to be too short with the wrong sensitive old fool. In the field I direct my energy somewhere _useful_ , but the longer I stay in the field, the more I feel as if every time I go back to the capital I’m going to explode.”

Iroh nodded. There were days he, too, was glad that custom allowed him occasionally to respond to an insult by ripping his stiff robes off and fighting a man in public. “You’re an asset to our nation, no matter how far you like to be from it,” he chuckled. “I’ll see that we both spend as much time doing real work in the middle of nowhere as we’re able. Think of the luxury that awaits us, though,” he said. Silk sheets and roast duck every day he asked for it, hot towels in the morning and massages before his muscles even grew tight. “Don’t you miss it, in the field?”

“A bit,” Jeong Jeong agreed, smiling slightly, no doubt thinking of his own noble house. “Not enough to want to stay as long as we must.”

“Think what the men with us would say, if they knew you turned up your nose at luxury,” Iroh said, but without really scolding. “When I wake up in the field chilled or hungry, the warm bed and servants waiting back home seem sweeter than I ever knew they were before I left the Fire Nation at all.”

“Every man we command should have the same waiting for them at home,” Jeong Jeong agreed. “Perhaps then they’d enjoy the free air as much as I do.”

Iroh exhaled a long, satisfied breath, at the pleasure that was his - to live a life of indulgence back home, and the thrill of exploration and conquest here on the other side of the sea. “And yet I never feel I’m going to explode truly,” he said, eyeing Jeong Jeong. “Not even when the oldest fool is sawing through my last nerve as they try to tell me how to conquer the Earth Kingdom with tactics they learned capturing waterbenders off the ice in the south.” He paused. “Someday, when we’re old men, I’ll take you back to the island,” he said, now not even daring to use specifics where the men could hear - “So you can learn from the Masters what you missed the first time.”

Jeong Jeong shuddered. “I will never go back to that place. You shouldn’t even mention it.”

“I won’t to anyone else,” Iroh chuckled. “No one needs to know how when the masters shared their secrets, you fainted in terror -”

“No one needs to know you left them alive,” Jeong Jeong hissed, listening that the noise from the men at the fire was still uninterrupted.

“Of course not,” Iroh agreed. “One day. Agni willing, you’ll understand their lesson.” He stood up. “Well, after all this walking, will you be ready for a sea journey?”

Jeong Jeong closed his eyes. “Hardly.”

Iroh chuckled as he walked away. “Then you should get your rest now, before we reach the port.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

~~~~

They burned their traveling rags the next morning before stepping onto the main road to Turtleray Bay. The clothing they’d brought, confiscated from Earth Kingdom travelers who’d wandered too close to camp, disguised them well enough as merchants and entourage. Huaji was unquestionable as a cranky beancounter with Loto, his apprentice, while Gen and Saburo were effortless mercenaries, but Jeong Jeong, never a skilled actor, only ever appeared as stiff as a soldier no matter how many jokes Iroh told him.

And Iroh had the chance to try many jokes out, leaving Gen and Saburo snickering red-faced as they struggled not to lose their military bearing while they waited in a tea house by the bay for the quartermaster and Loto to return with passage to the colonies. They had longer to wait than Iroh had expected, for when they returned, Huaji was red-faced with anger and Loto looked as pale as a bled fish.

“This priv - _young clerk_ has no concept of the value of money,” Huaji announced, without even greeting his superiors properly. “But I’ve found a boat. The Hoshimaru departs for the colonies tomorrow.”

“Sergeant,” Loto said, tentative.

“I’ve heard enough from you today for all of us,” Huaji interrupted, rounding on the boy.

“I’d like to hear what Loto has to say,” Iroh cut in, lightly. “I brought him along to hear his opinion.”  
He knew Huaji bristled under a younger man’s command, even a younger man of noble birth, but there was nothing he could do about his age or Huaji’s peasant pride. 

Loto glanced from the angry sergeant to Iroh, and gave in to authority’s offer of a listening ear. “Sir, the Hoshimaru is cheap because it’s a bad boat with a bad crew.” Iroh waited for him to go on. The boy went on talking, as boys with nerves often did, given the invitation of silence. “It’s an old fishing boat, but the crew aren’t fishermen,” Loto said. “They might not be smugglers, but - even if they are, they’re not caring for the ship well. All the metal’s rust-warped, no one’s scraped the hull in too long, and it needs repainting -”

“You hear that! He wants to spend all the money we have over a little bit of chipped paint,” Huaji burst out. “He wants to squander the Fire Lord’s wealth so he can sit in a pretty boat.”

“Sergeant, I asked the young man to speak.”

“The caulk is crawling in the hull,” Loto went on. Iroh had no idea what that meant, but it sounded bad. “The ship’s not being maintained. And I heard -” he pressed his lips together. “I heard the cook arguing with the captain over provisions. The cook wants to feed the crew better, but the captain wants to save money and just give them cabbage and broth. They’re about to mutiny. I can feel it, sir.”

Iroh shuddered. “I can feel it too.”

“And it’s typhoon season, sir,” Loto said. “There are better boats to take, especially when it’s typhoon season.”

“You sound like you have a better boat in mind.”

Loto nodded vigorously. “The Swordfish, Major.”

“The Swordfish is a pleasure craft for spoiled heirs, and it doesn’t even go to the Colonies,” Huaji cut in. "It's barely more than a bamboo raft!"

A pleasure craft for spoiled heirs sounded more than fine to Iroh, especially after two years in the field at battle or at command. “What is its port?” he asked Loto, not Huaji.

“Changbao,” said Loto. “Ferries go from there to the Colonies every day. We can get off the Swordfish and right onto a ferry that would take us straight to the Citrine -”

“Tell him the difference in cost,” Huaji interrupted again.

“What does the Swordfish have to recommend it?” Iroh asked instead. 

“Oh it’s a well-maintained ship, sir. All their rigging is in good condition. The harbormaster said the crew’s worked together for years without a problem. Three lifeboats. They have a band, for entertainment.” He hesitated again. “Some of the crew are women.”

“You had me at ‘they have a band,’ Iroh said, draining the dregs of his tea and standing up.

“Sir! The cost!” Huaji tried.

“Whatever the difference, I’ll make up,” Iroh assured him. “The Fire Lord won’t be angry with you, I can assure you of that.”

“You haven’t heard the cost yet,” said Huaji, but for women and song, Iroh could not have cared at that point what the actual cost was.

~~~~

The Swordfish was a good-looking ship, even men who’d only ever sailed on Fire Nation naval ships could see. The bright green ship stood just a little taller at the mast than others at anchorage in the bay, with long floats outrigged on either side. When they arrived at the dock in anticipation of their boarding time, two men in pale green sleeveless uniforms were already waiting for them with a long canoe, fitted with two outriggers and painted the same emerald green as the Swordfish. The two rowers weren’t even winded after ferrying the band of six the half-mile to the side of the ship. Judging by the size of their heavily tattooed arms, they could have rowed all afternoon and not been tired.

The crew hauled their luggage aboard and a stewardess in the same light, sleeveless uniform as the rowers ushered them to their guest quarters. The single lower deck was for cargo and crew quarters, while the airy superstructure on the top deck housed the guests in screened privacy. The men’s cabins were narrow, but very clean, and much breezier than Fire Nation naval ships. Iroh still planned to spend as much time as possible on the ship’s bow, where the musicians were positioned under shade and the stewardesses and the female deckhands might pass by, laughing pleasantly, or just smelling sweeter and fresher than soldiers in camp ever did.

A sharp whistle pierced the air. Iroh heard knocking on the door of a cabin farther down from his. He poked his head into the passageway to see the dark-eyed stewardess already addressing Loto, who looked seconds from proposing marriage to the first clean woman he’d been so close to in a year.

“ - back top deck, please,” the stewardess said, and Loto nodded along, not appearing to actually comprehend what she said. The young woman raised her eyebrows. It was clear she was having to work hard not to roll her eyes. “All right sir. Well I have to tell the rest of our guests -”

“Back deck, you said?” Iroh asked, striding down the corridor to grip Loto by the shoulder. The boy jolted out of his fugue, reddening quickly as the stewardess grasped this lifeline.

“Yes sir,” she said. “For the embarking safety brief.”

“How sensible!” Iroh said, leaning over to pound on Jeong Jeong’s door. A groan issued from within. “Loto, go with this young lady, and see that Huaji receives his orders. I’ll get Gen and Saburo.” Better to leave Jeong Jeong and Huaji for the young lady and Loto to brief, so Loto had only cranky older men to be compared to for as long as possible before he had the competition of the two handsome corporals. Loto mumbled his thanks, divining the intent. As Iroh walked towards the corporals rooms and the stern exit, Loto managed to say something in a wavering voice that made the girl laugh. He grinned at the boy’s success.

On the back deck, Iroh identified the other passengers - a pair of real merchants and an Earth Kingdom family of nobles, young enough to appear newlywed, an infant in the woman’s arms. The family had surely claimed the stateroom cabin at the very stern of the superstructure, which he would have claimed were he sailing under his true identity, if this vessel were not sailing under the flag of a technical enemy. The crew were at work carrying cargo belowdeck, industrious as ants.

At the very stern of the vessel, the captain, a tall woman with short-cropped hair going grey at the temples, raised her hand for attention. “We do this every voyage,” she announced, to the standing passengers. “In the event an emergency is piped -” she nodded towards a short sailor with hair so faded brown by the sun that its dark brown showed auburn highlights. He blew five piercing, short blasts on a long silver whistle - “guests will don their float vests and assemble at the lifeboat located on the side of the deck corresponding to their cabin.”

The two canoes that served as life and working boats hung on either side of the vessel. At each boat a team of sailors held bright yellow-painted cork vests out to the passengers, and showed them where more were lashed down inside the lifeboats.

“In the event of a man overboard -” the captain nodded towards the back of the ship, where a small, flat-decked sailing craft with three slim hulls was mounted off the back on a small ramp, ready to be dropped into the ocean. “Keep eyes on the person in the water and do not stop shouting. Our fastboat will follow your direction to the man overboard.” The only sailor assigned to the fastboat, a darkly tanned woman, beamed at the guests from beneath her wide hat and adjusted her wooden slitted eye protection.

The guests were all made to practice donning the floatvests and finding the emergency flares tied inside. Iroh was surprised to see the Earth Kingdom had adopted the Fire Nation's design for emergency flares, and he pretended not to already know to hold one at an angle so the molten fuel would drip into the water instead of onto his hand. The Captain watched them each identify their assigned lifeboat, and instructed them not to risk the time to rescue any material good in the event that the captain announced Abandon Ship. 

“This is your only job as my guests,” the Captain concluded the brief, “but don’t worry. No guest sailing under my flag has had to do their job yet.”

~~~~

The guests were ushered to cushions at the the shaded bow for the embarking of the Swordfish. With the wind low, the sailors were only lowering and trimming one sail, and all the men but Loto were surprised to see the rowers hopping over the side of the top deck to seat themselves by the outrigged floats, barely out of the water, to row out of the harbor. That two dozen sailors could row a ship large enough for the comfortable carriage of cargo and passengers was a surprise to the Fire Nation soldiers, who'd never voyaged in boats not powered by coal and made of metal.

“How can they expect to make it to Changbao in a week at this crawl?” Jeong Jeong growled, even as the young stewardess poured embarking sake into his cup.

“The wind will probably pick up after we leave the wind shield of the bay,” Loto said, following the stewardess with stricken eyes. “Sir,” he added, coming back to himself enough to remember propriety. The boy picked up his sake and sipped it overeagerly, nervous now from military propriety on one side and romantic longing from the other.

The sake sloshed in Jeong Jeong’s cup. “Will the ride be smoother then?” he asked, a little weakly. 

Loto did not have an answer Jeong Jeong would have liked, so the boy hurriedly finished his sake and didn’t say anything, breathing heavily against the burn of the liquor.

Iroh found in a few moments of eavesdropping that the Earth Kingdom nobleman and women were on their way to the bride’s family’s tea plantation, and so immediately decided that a diplomatic friendship was not only a possibility but his responsibility. However, as he chatted with the young mother and her groomsman about the mountain geography and weather conditions that went into the growing of the finest oolong, Jeong Jeong only continued to look worse, eventually leaning to pinch the bridge of his nose in his hand, his eyes screwed tight against a headache. 

Before Iroh could suggest that it was time for the captain to take himself somewhere less enclosed, though, the fastboat sailor from the safety brief paused beside their party. She still had her eye protection on, and a thick smear of pale yellow paste covering her nose and cheekbones, stark against her dark skin.

“Honey, how you doin’?” she asked Jeong Jeong, in the thickest, most rural Earth Kingdom accent Iroh had ever heard. “You’re lookin’ pretty seasick.”

“I’m not your honey,” Jeong Jeong growled, yet groaned at the same time, without lifting his head from his hand.

The sailor pressed her lips together, her eye protection concealing the extent of her expression. Iroh suspected she was rolling her eyes. “Well you are seasick. You’ll feel better amidships in the fresh air. C’mon, I’ll take you.”

Jeong Jeong lurched to his feet. “Please be right,” he groaned, as the woman gave him her shoulder to lean on. 

Gen reached for the captain’s cup of sake. “Well, if he’s not going to drink it -”

Iroh stood up to go on his own quick journey. “Miss,” he addressed the stewardess, “Could I get something from your kitchen stores?”

A few moments to follow the stewardess - Kirakira - to the _galley_ , she corrected him, with cheeky pertness that no girl would have dared address him with if he were traveling under his own identity - to retrieve a ginger root, and then a few moments more to take the ginger root to his cabin and heat water for the tea that he’d used to settle his own stomach on more than one naval passage. On the top deck, Jeong Jeong was easy to find, for he had the sound of the fastboat sailor’s peculiar accent to follow, as she finished telling Jeong Jeong a story the captain was clearly not appreciating.

“- So I pulled the catgator out of my pants, right? You remember I had the catgator hidden there? He was just a kittengator then. Anyway things started to get real weird after that-” 

_“Started?_ ” Jeong Jeong echoed, sounding as if the fresh air had done nothing for his headache.

“I would like to hear every part of that story from start to finish,” Iroh said, sitting down beside his second. “But first, you could use this,” he said, pressing a cup into Jeong Jeong’s hands.

“Is that ginger?” the sailor leaned around Jeong Jeong, looking through her eyewear at the pouring tea. “Good idea!”

“I am not putting anything in my stomach,” Jeong Jeong objected.

“It’ll help,” Iroh insisted. “Try it. I made it myself.”

“Better that you do,” counseled the sailor. “Ever try to throw up on an empty stomach? Much better to have somethin’ down there, believe you me.”

“Care for some?” Iroh asked, digging in his pocket for another cup. “I brought a spare.”

“Ain’t you sweet!” she said, holding out her hand for the cup. Between the hat and the eye protection, he couldn’t tell much about her appearance, but she had a nice smile. Her accent, while strange, was honey-slow and charming. Iroh decided he wouldn’t mind hearing it more.

“Don’t worry,” he consoled his captain, as he filled a cup for the lady and handed it over, sure to catch her eye (as well as he could catch them through the slits in her wooden eyewear) and smile, slower than when he wasn’t trying to charm. “You’ll have your sea legs in no time.” He jostled Jeong Jeong’s shoulder. “Once you’re feeling better, you’ll be back to as joyful as you ever were. And I’m sure the band will let you join them, to pass the time.”

“Oh, the band?” the fastboat sailor pressed, interested.

“Yes, the band,” Iroh said, repressing a chuckle. “Because you’re a musician, Jeong Jeong. Isn’t that right?”

He wondered if the captain would dare to contradict him.

A beat passed as Jeong Jeong picked up, very disdainfully, what Iroh was putting down.

“Certainly,” Jeong Jeong agreed, in the flattest of tones. “It is as you say, sir. I am . . . a musician.”

“You’ll get your sea legs sooner than later,” the sailor reassured him. “You’ll be playing the dizidu again in no time.”

“I don’t play the dizidu.”

“Oh are you sayin’ you dizi-don’t?”

She cracked up at her own joke as quickly as Iroh did.

“No one advertised that this ship had a comedian as well!” he said, when he could speak without laughing again.

“No one should have,” Jeong Jeong muttered.

“I am begging you to begin your story again,” Iroh pressed, pleased as the woman drank her tea. “The one about the catgator.”

“Oh honey I’d love to,” she said, with real regret. “But I gotta go pull an oar now.” She sounded resigned as she stood up. “If your friend don’t feel better soon, just ask around for Bei Vil. She’s the medic.”

She bowed to both of them, sloppily, but at least she bowed before leaving.

“If I had to listen to you flirt with that commoner one more minute I was going to throw up after all,” Jeong Jeong groaned.

“She was funny,” Iroh said, settling back on the locker. “I’d like to see what’s under her mud mask.”

“Sure, her mud mask.”

“Drink your tea,” he instructed. “That’s an order.”

Jeong Jeong sipped his tea. Already, he did look slightly less sallow in the face as he stared out to the horizon. A very slight breeze over the front of the boat dried the sweat from his forehead.

“What are we going to do with the men, for a week at sea?” he asked. “Nowhere to walk, nowhere to . . . _practice_.” He said the word so meaningfully he could only mean ‘firebend.’ “The men will be burning up inside by the time we reach Changbao.”

“ _You’ll_ be burning up inside.”

“I will.” Jeong Jeong exhaled a long, hot breath, that rippled in the air. “Our journey’s just begun and I already can’t wait for it to be ended.”

“The men are professionals,” Iroh said, with little concern. Huaji and Loto were not firebenders, and Saburo and Gen could expend their energy sparring with practice knives, as mercenaries would be expected. “They’ll find something to occupy themselves.”

“And you’ll find entertainment, I’m sure,” Jeong Jeong murmured, but he kept sipping his tea, a sure sign his seasickness was diminished.

“The ship has _two_ pai sho sets and about a dozen board games besides,” Iroh agreed, eager for the chance to sit and take all his men’s money with strategy (then generously spend it on them in the colonies). “If you learn anything on this voyage, may it be how to relax.”

“I’ll do my best, sir,” Jeong Jeong said, with another long exhale, cool enough not to be visible this time.

Iroh missed the conversation with the tea heiress and her groom. He stood up. “This voyage will be good for you,” he said, with no real reason to say it. He hadn’t foreseen anything about the voyage, nor did he feel one way or the other, but things had a way of coming true more often if they were spoken aloud. “I’m sure of it.”

He went back to his cabin, believing wholly that this voyage could, indeed, go very well for them all.

~~~~

A/N: Up next: the voyage does not go well for anyone at all. 


	2. From the Roof of Sky Above to the Deep Blue Sea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I love the concept of the Foggy Swamp Tribe. Warm-weather waterbenders who teach women to bend and evaded the notice of the Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom so well that even the Southern Water Tribe doesn't remember them? How much cooler can you get?
> 
> But in the actual show they're not modeled after a specific indigenous culture the way the Northern and Southern water tribes are, getting only a U.S. Gulf Coast accent and a joke about Katara not wanting to find out she's related to them. I've decided to model their culture on the pre-European contact people of Florida, mostly the Timucua.
> 
> Meanwhile, the Earth Kingdom boats in this chapter are based on Polynesian sailing vessels, which I imagine were used in the islands between the Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation. It makes sense to me to assume that a few islands in that region, particularly the Fire Nation colonies, could be based on the Philippines or Indonesia.
> 
> This chapter's title is from the song Deep Blue Sea, by Deep Forest and Anggun.
> 
> If I did my job right, you'll end this chapter feeling seasick. Good luck!

Dawn broke over the open sea with the Earth Kingdom vanished from the horizon. The waves flowed from the stern, speeding the boat on, and though only one sail was unfurled, no sailor was obligated to pull an oar. Despite the full sail, the breeze that passed over the deck and through the guest shelter was light. The ship nearly matched the speed of the wind.

The men of the Fire Nation rose naturally with the sun, but Huaji and Jeong Jeong, free of their usual logistical obligations, were not out of their cabins to greet the dawn with Iroh. Gen and Saburo, technically still on duty as his bodyguard, emerged from their cabins precisely as he did, and Loto was already seated on the rail at the bow when they arrived. The colonial boy dangled his feet over the open water, comfortable on the sea as if he had come home.

Iroh wondered why Loto joined the army instead of the navy. When they were no longer on the boat, Iroh thought he might ask. The colonial boy’s life was as far from his as he imagined the life of anyone who was still a citizen of the Fire Nation. He surely had a story worth keeping in mind, for the man who’d be the first Fire Lord to inherit the colonies and their culture.

There was no room in their masquerade for greeting the dawn according to Fire Nation custom, but Iroh still enjoyed breathing in the energy of the rising sun. The sunrise left all four men feeling rested, yet pleasantly alert as the rest of the guests roused for breakfast. Even Jeong Jeong seemed to have gotten over his seasickness, between the pleasant weather, an early rest, and a long night’s sleep.

The morning meal of fruit and steamed sweet buns would have been delicious even if Iroh didn’t have a year of soldier’s rations to compare it to. The musical trio’s morning performance was lovelier with the background sound of the sea, and the ship’s cooks brewed fine enough tea that Iroh didn’t feel the need to make his own. It was absolutely as pleasant as a vacation, refreshing utterly after years of fighting northern barbarians and taming a raging river. 

The sea, silver in the early low sunlight, became the most vivid blue under the noonday sun, clear for several fathoms down. They passed island after island, sailed over channels so deep that the blue seemed to swallow the light, and over reefs so shallow that Iroh realized a Fire Nation ship couldn’t safely navigate this route. The shallow-drafting wooden karakoa could never have withstood a second of assault from a Fire Nation ship, but when the sailors unfurled the second sail to the increasing wind, the boat picked up such speed that it barely seemed to touch the surface of the water at all.

With breakfast complete, Iroh had nothing more pressing to do than socialize with the other guests. He acquainted himself with the two true merchants on the ship, playing up his false identity as a tea broker, and learned more about Earth Kingdom porcelain in an afternoon than he’d learned in his life. He continued his conversation with Eun the tea heiress and her husband Kwan, and over the course of the morning learned directions to their plantation. He filed that information away to ensure Fire Nation forces ever assigned to their province knew not to burn the family’s property, and to offer them every diplomatic option for the security of trade. When he satisfied his curiosity about his fellow passengers, he got down to the business of discovering, between them and his men, what new Pai Sho tricks this voyage would teach him.

Captain Fang joined them at lunch, to share stories about the wildlife that accompanied their regular voyages. Foxphins appeared as she spoke, a pod of dozens threading in and out of the wake cast off the outriggers. Foxphins often appeared in the greater wake thrown off coal-powered naval ships, but they were a distant sight from the decks of Fire Nation boats with their towering freeboard. On the Swordfish, they leaped at eye level, close enough to enjoy the perfect watercolor blending of their russet-orange and silver hides. Three times Captain Fang pointed to the horizon where a manta-whale was about to breach, her instinct for their appearance almost supernatural.

In the evening the breeze slackened. Sailors emerged from belowdeck to climb to the outriggers and deploy paddles. When Iroh passed the hatch that lead below, the air flowing up from the lower deck was cool - unusually so, unless all sailing vessels were all much cooler inside than the metal ships he was used to. When Iroh asked a sailor about the cool air, the man shrugged and said it was a trade secret - something about a salt-reactive formula in silver pipes the Captain wouldn’t share the technical details of with the crew. “Probably too complicated for me to get anyway,” the sailor demurred, as he hopped the rail to take his place half in the ocean on the outrigger.

A salt-reactive formula in silver was such a simple thing to promise artificially cool air. Iroh made a note to advise his father to order the Citrine to board the Swordfish with a naval engineer as soon as possible. His father would understand the technicalities once a Fire Nation naval officer copied the captain’s work, and cool air belowdecks would vastly improve morale on Fire Nation ships assigned to tropical patrol. His father would be pleased, as would the sailors. This unexpected boon from the Tephra’s drydocking improved Iroh’s mood more. 

He was, unfortunately, the only member of his team whose mood didn’t rapidly decline. 

The men, after catching entirely up on sleep by the third day of the voyage, got quickly bored of listening to music, playing board games with rich strangers, and looking for animals. It was to be expected of young men who were used to drilling at combat no less than two hours and running no less than five miles a day. Gen and Saburo did their best to curb their energy, sparring on the stern deck three times a day or more. Jeong Jeong, without freedom to be suspected as anything other than a man of money and trade, was restricted to walking circle after circle of the top deck, when he was not too seasick to walk. Loto sparred intermittently with Gen and Saburo, but on the second day he said something to his favorite stewardess that put him out of her favor. The boy wallowed in his embarrassment and frustration, following her only with his eyes now that she responded to his conversation with strictly professional coolness. Huaji didn’t have the steam of the younger men to blow off, and was contented to play game after game of Pai Sho. But after taking pity on the sergeant’s fruitless quest to win just once, Iroh let him. It was a mistake. Huaji recognized the pity, and was so insulted to be gone easy on that he turned down all of Iroh’s subsequent invitations to a game.

The situation threatened to erupt on the fourth morning when Iroh, looking westward for manta whales, absentmindedly took the dish of lychee preserves and emptied the remainder onto his banana fritters. 

Saburo cut in before his brain caught up with his stomach. “I wanted some of that,” he objected.

Huaji, a sergeant for almost half his service, seemed to expand as his vocation took over. “What did you say, cor -” he cut himself off before speaking Saburo’s rank. “What did you say to _your employer_?”

Iroh held his tongue against his own instinct to snap back that _there were more lychee preserves in the world_. Saburo already paled with regret and frustration for disrespecting his executive officer. _He’d be sick with shame if he knew who he’d truly disrespected_ , Iroh thought, taking a breath. He put the empty preserve jar down. “Let’s not spoil the morning with argument,” he said, lightly. “When we reach Changbao, I’ll buy you a whole jar,” he promised, smiling. He added to Huaji, “We can settle the matter then.”

Saburo would not enjoy discipline in Changbao hanging over his head, but by then, Huaji would have calmed down enough to give the corporal his restrictions or extra duties without first shouting until Saburo was half-deaf. And Iroh would buy the corporal a jar, he decided, regretting that he’d inconsiderately taken the preserves without thinking of his men. He waited for Saburo to acknowledge his peace offering. The corporal nodded, frustration fading from his eyes, leaving regret. Huaji nodded, acknowledging the timeframe. He would not forget the discipline the soldier was owed.

Leading men so often turned into moments like this, of holding his own temper to delegate discipline to the appropriate executor, to let all men do their jobs and yet remind all men of their place. All without earning their dislike for being too harsh, or their disrespect for being too soft. The tales of war he’d listened to rapt in youth were so full of glorious battle, one great warrior triumphing over another, cities lost or held, victory in incredible violence. He’d learned since that a whole war was composed mostly of managing other men - but no great storyteller composed epics about delegation, or the intricacies of considering a hundred men’s separate feelings and leaving one’s own for last. Yet most of what he seemed to do as a military officer was not win a few great victories, but win countless small victories in keeping bored men from taking out their boredom on each other.

The late Fire Lady Ilah, once Captain Ilah, told him to expect as much once he arrived in the field. He’d never doubted her, but he’d found year after year how true his mother’s words had been.

The men had the freedom of commoners, though, to occasionally lose their composure. It was out of the question that he do so, even if they believed him only an officer of noble birth. As the stewardess collected the remains of their meal and the men went their ways, each looking to express his own energy in a limited space, he found himself once again circling the deck with Jeong Jeong.

“Looking forward to palace formality yet?” Jeong Jeong said, quietly, as they walked.

Iroh’s smile was wry. “Looking farther forward to the field again.”

Jeong Jeong’s smile said “I told you so” without speaking it aloud.

~~~~

That fourth night, Iroh awoke several hours after sunset. His mind refused to quiet. He left the cabin to walk the deck again.

The night was cool but windless. The paddlers splashed below, the steersmen calling every tenth stroke to change sides. The wooden boat creaked as it flexed with the waves. It didn’t seem a great deal of noise, but Iroh was still almost fully to the stern by the time he overheard the voices raised there.

He leaned around the guest quarters to see the captain and the rescue boat sailor arguing. One second’s overview told him the sailor was losing, based on the Captain’s stony face. The sailor gestured with irritation as her voice rose and fell, irritation that a naval sailor would never have dared to approach an officer with. Huaji had been ready to drag Saburo behind the boat that morning for so much less. Iroh drew close enough to catch the tail end of the sailor’s argument “ - won’t be here afterward. I can promise you that,” she said, clearly expecting the captain to be impacted.

“That’s your decision,” Captain Fang said, curt.

The sailor scoffed. “It’s the all I can do,” she said. When the captain remained silent, the sailor’s scoff took on disbelief. “It’s not like you can replace me!”

The captain’s glare made the sailor lean back.

“You’re mistaken,” the captain said, quietly and clearly. “I am done listening to this.”

She swept past the sailor. The younger woman stood in place, slouching with the posture of one who has lost an argument they were so sure of winning. She put one hand to her hip and covered her eyes, ran her hand down her face, and looked far out to sea with a long exhalation.

Iroh cleared his throat as he walked astern.

“Pardon my overhearing,” he said as the sailor jumped, eyes pale in the moonlight.

“Sorry you saw that, sir,” she sighed, wiping her cheeks. “You oughta be asleep. What are you doing up at this hour?”

“Relaxing’s a fine way to pass the time, but now that it’s the only thing to do, I’m going a little stir-crazy. I can’t sleep.” He sat down on a gear locker set against the guest shelter and patted the empty space next to himself. “I can listen to some troubles, if you want to talk -?”

She sighed. “It’s just a difference of opinion the captain and I have had for a while. I promise it’s not interesting.”

“Neither is staring out to sea without any conversation,” Iroh pointed out, raising an eyebrow. “Are you and the captain - involved?” he let the question hang meaningfully, and she waved her hands.

“Oh! My goodness no,” the sailor exclaimed, laughter in her tone. “The captain has _real_ strict rules about relationships aboard.” She rolled her eyes. “The captain has real strict rules about everything.”

He got what he wanted, though, as she settled on the locker beside him. 

“I’ve never been good at _rules_ ,” she admitted. “And everywhere I go has got its own little ones for how people ain’t supposed to talk to each other. The captain and half the crew are from the same province, and it’s like they speak a language I don’t. Part of that language is gettin’ listened to by not bein’ too mad, but if you state your position real quiet and peaceful, nobody even hears it, so I can’t speak up for myself soft like at home -”

Iroh thought of the variety of the rules that applied in the field, that applied undercover in the Earth Kingdom, that applied in the Capital, and the contradictions they required him to navigate. He wondered what it was like to have ever lived without accepting that navigation as background noise in his life. “That sounds like quite the struggle,” he said, wondering what distant little rural village the peasant sailor came from, to have seen her own variety of etiquettes to misunderstand.

“I just figured I’d have a place here longer than this,” she said, forlorn enough that past his bemusement, he still felt pity. “I like this crew.” She paused, looking at the horizon. “I wasn’t ready to be done with this life.”

“It must be hard, to jump from one life to another,” he said. He knew it was hard. He was doing it then, traveling under this false identity on his way home to his identity as the Crown Prince, and then bound to voyage again back to his identity as a major.

He knew the place he’d been born into. He knew it was a hard place, but there was security in it. He knew where he belonged. He had the skills he needed to thrive in that difficulty. The sailor had the freedom to roam the world without anyone caring where she went, but as a consequence, no one cared for her. If he’d ever idly envied a position like hers, now he felt a little smug not to share it.

“It would’ve been harder not to come all this way,” she said.

“You sound like you have a story to tell.” A story was good for passing a sleepless night. A pretty woman was good for passing a sleepless night with. The moonlight gleamed on her dark hair, knotted tightly into a bun at the back of her neck. Her pale eyes would be a pretty green in candlelight, and her slow accent grew more pleasant the longer he heard it. “I still have some ginger in my cabin,” he offered, remembering she liked it, “and jasmine tea I was saving for a special occasion, if you’d like to tell it where the captain won’t hear.”

He didn’t touch her, but he did lean in to close the distance between them. He kept his smile slow, kind and understanding. The sailor looked at him out of the corner of her eye, vulnerable and thoughtful, and a little sad -

She burst out laughing, put her whole hand on his face and pushed him away. 

A different Crown Prince of the Fire Nation would have exploded in fury. This rejection from a peasant who dared to touch him disrespectfully and laugh so hard while she did it would have gotten her as good as exiled in his home –

\- his home where he couldn’t always tell if someone laughed at his jokes because he was funny, or because he’d be their Fire Lord one day. Home where if a woman spoke to him, it was up to him to determine if the woman liked his company, or liked the prospect of his crown.

“Oh my, does that work for you a lot?” she leaned away, her humor genuine and without anger. She mimicked him through her thick accent. “’Why miss you look so sad, how ‘bout you come on back to my fancy rich man cabin with my classy rich man stuff ‘n tell me all your little poor gal troubles?’” she laughed again.

He laughed a little too. Obtaining company as _himself_ without a crown was much more rewarding than with. If it meant a few rejections in the course of his life, well, what if it did? He would still be the crown prince of the most powerful nation in the world after a woman such as this moved on. “I’d have to take a few more sea voyages to tell you if it works,” he said. “So far I’m 0 for 1.”

“I ain’t gonna lie, I’m flattered,” she said, peeking over her hand. “But just because the captain and I ain’t gettin’ along doesn’t mean I wanna get fired on THIS trip, and passin’ time in a guest’s room would do it. Besides,” she stood up, but looked him up and down. “Talk to me in Changbao maybe? I’ve got paddlin’ duty.”

“You know where to find me, if you change your mind, right?” he asked, watching her go.

“It’s not that big a boat,” she agreed, disappearing over the side.

~~~~

He intended to try again the next night, waiting at the same locker to get conversation to pass the evening, but by sunset something was wrong.

He wasn’t sure why. The sky was sunny in the hour before, but the crew were anxious. They tried not to show it, but he saw the crew lashing the lifeboats at the stern with double lines, knotted for quick release.

Loto confirmed his suspicion. “Yes sir, it smells like a storm. It’s that sort of . . .” He tried to figure out how to describe it. “It’s hard to tell you what it smells like. It doesn’t smell like anything BUT a storm.” 

Iroh took a deep breath of the air, trying to find the unfamiliar note that meant ‘storm -’ but he couldn’t tell it from the rest of the unfamiliar smells of the open sea. 

He returned to his cabin to ensure he had everything he’d need for an emergency. The only irreplaceable thing was the seal that confirmed his identity, in case he needed to leverage his way onto the Citrine and alter its patrol, and he kept that on his person at all times anyway. He looked through his gear, considering what else he’d want on a lifeboat.

He was still sorting when the knock came to his door.

Captain Fang bowed in his doorframe respectfully, and didn’t waste her words. “I regret to inform you that we will pass through a storm,” she said, with deliberate calm. “We’ve diverted to the nearest port, but I would like to see your float vest.”

He produced his float vest from its hook on the screen wall, and proved he remembered the angle to hold his flare. The captain bowed to him again and moved to the next cabin.

He found his men, intending to brief them as privately as possible. The six men assembled at the stern. Gen and Saburo shifted and frowned, antsy over a threat that they couldn’t stab. Jeong Jeong already wore his float vest, and Loto looked at him with quiet skepticism.

“I don’t think you need to wear that yet,” Iroh said.

“I’m going to anyway,” Jeong Jeong said flatly. Already he seemed paler, seasick with anticipation.

“If the amount of money we paid for a safe ship doesn’t keep us alive, this ship doesn’t deserve to stay afloat,” Huaji grumbled. “I think we paid for overcaution.”

“Overcaution at sea’s not bad,” Gen muttered. 

“Especially in a tiny wooden boat,” Saburo agreed.

“Have you looked outside?” Huaji said. “There’s not a cloud over a single star. Diverting the voyage will put us behind at least a day. What if -”

“We could pass the whole evening in could-have-beens,” Iroh said, before Huaji mentioned the Citrine or the Colonies where they might be overheard. “If all the crew can do in this situation is head for shore, then there’s no point getting upset when they’re already doing it. All we can do is rest while we can, instead of working ourselves up over an emergency that may not happen.”

The men muttered their agreement, and returned to their rooms.

He wasn’t worried.

He couldn’t tell the men why he wasn’t worried, but as often happened when he faced an uncertainty in life, he remembered his vision.

He’d been so young when he saw his country’s banner hanging in the burning city, as vividly as if he were already inside the impenetrable wall. Young enough that he shouldn’t have understood, and yet he’d known in that moment _that one day he would conquer Ba Sing Se._

It was as inevitable as his mother’s death had been. He’d foreseen that, too.

The vision he hadn’t wanted to believe had come true, down to the scent of her funereal incense. He would live to fulfill the vision that was of victory. 

Distant thunder rolled over the water. He put on layer after layer in case he would need warmth against the rain, and settled down to wait out the storm.

The Swordfish had been so stable on their journey that he had no idea how Jeong Jeong found the motion enough to be sick at. The wide outrigger floats kept the vessel steadier than a Gem twice its length. But within an hour, the pitch of the boat as it flew up and down waves was so extreme that Iroh felt sick enough to need fresh air.

He turned the corner to exit the guest shelter, but met the stewardess Kirakira, wearing her float vest and gripping the rail.

“Please stay inside,” she said, her tan face pale in the night, rain lashing her hood. He considered with  
wonder how brave the young girl was, that she regularly risked these conditions and was as stoic as a soldier now that she’d reached them.

“If I stay in there I’ll be sick,” he protested, bracing himself in the hall to breathe fresh air. The smell was so sharp, so fresh, like the air before -

“I know, sir, but -”

He grabbed the stewardess and covered her right before the lightning struck.

The crack snapped the hearing out of his right ear. His left heard Kirakira screaming, then more shouts, and the wooden boat was immediately on fire. Before he reacted, a wave extinguished the flames, but a softer crack issued as the mast above them splintered -

How the mast didn’t fall and crack the boat in two, he wasn’t looking to see, but he heard the five blasts of the bosun’s whistle and Captain Fang’s voice rising, astonishingly loud over the storm - “ _Abandon ship!_ ”

The cabin behind him smoked in ruin. He pulled Kirakira to her feet and ran with her to the stern, meeting Eun the tea heiress with her baby howling in her arms along the way, Kwan limping after her. The sailors held the lifeboats in place by lines looped once around wooden cleats. Two men yanked quick-release lines loose at a loud shout of “ _Cast off!_ ” and the rescue boat slid off the squared-off stern with a splash.

“Get in,” ordered one of the sailors, manhandling him into the waiting lifeboat. Eun sobbed as loudly as her baby behind him, her body curled protectively around the infant, Kwan wrapped as much around her as she around their child. Gen and Saburo leaped into the boat fore and aft of him. Across the way sat the two merchants, Loto and Jeong Jeong leaping aboard as the last of the paddlers took their place on the outriggers, prepared to launch -

Huaji was not among them. “Where’s the last man?” Iroh shouted to the sailor with the line on his lifeboat. He stood up, but the man shook his head and pushed him back into the canoe. He fended the man off easily, ducked under his arm, and stepped onto the deck already flooded with water.

The sailor screamed at him to get back. Gen and Saburo were shouting, the captain’s voice rising over them all as she commanded him to return. The woman had no authority over him, whether she agreed or not.

He ran into the smoking cabin. He’d never put his float vest on, and he was glad not to have his movement hampered. In the dimness he bumped up against something soft and fleshy, and grabbed Huaji under the arm, pulling him over his shoulder.

“You’re not doing your job,” he joked, as he dragged the sergeant out into the less-dark of open night, the water flooding his boots. “Did you forget what the Captain told us already? It was only a few days ago -”

The sailor at the lifeboat cursed him as heavily as he’d ever heard a man curse, but on his shoulder, Huaji asked in a voice oddly soft for an old sergeant, “Where are we going?” and Iroh looked down to see the gash on the his forehead, the blood running down all the way to his navel, spreading even onto Iroh’s chest. He’d mistaken the dampness for a deluge of seawater, there was so much of it. Huaji’s jacket was half-on, his eyes unfocused.

“We’re going to the colonies, remember?” he said, his own voice shaking suddenly as he dragged the sergeant to the lifeboat. A huge wave tilted the karakoa forward, and he grabbed the rail, holding them from falling back into blackness, his entire stomach suddenly boiling, electricity alive in his chest with terror. When the vessel leveled, both lifeboats were in the water, drifting away.

Iroh half-ran, Huaji stumbling with exhausted determination not to hold him back, and reached the boat in time to grab the bow. He hoisted the sergeant into the water, and the sailors grabbed him, pulled him aboard, reached for Iroh, shouted at him to jump -

Another wave hit the karakoa and heaved the stern to the sky.

Iroh tumbled down the length of the pitching vessel. He failed to grab the rail, slick with water, and plunged into the roaring dark.

He plummeted into the cold water. All the layers he’d put on against the possibility of cold rain were nets weighing him down. His boots sliced through the water without giving any lift to his kicks, as if he kicked only air. He struggled out of his coat, the water pressing his nostrils, his lungs already convulsing with the urge to exhale, the need to breathe and the fear that he would not get to a scream filling his mind. _This could be all I feel for the rest of my life, the rest of my life could be waiting for death to take this pain away,_ the fear screamed in him.

He escaped the jacket and drew his arms down in a powerful pull that made spots cloud his vision. He broke the surface and breathed half a breath before the water surged over him. The wave hadn’t even fallen from above on top of him - the water just swelled beside him so fast that his body didn’t bob in time with the wave. The surface he’d been at was suddenly overhead. He struggled up again and sucked in a full breath, stomach tight with panic, mouth flooded with salt. His feet were pendulums dragging him down. Water loomed around him, like he’d fallen into a deep hole, and a wave passed through him again. He pulled to the surface and crested a wave, spotting the flares on the lifeboats, and they were -  
They were so far off, and they were to his right, not even in the direction the waves broke. He heard no human scream but his own. The water had carried him in a direction totally unexpected.

The ocean dropped him back into a trench between waves, his stomach tossing as the next wave thundered over him and he struggled to the surface once more. He snatched another half-lungful of air before a wave broke again, then filled his lungs without time to look for the lifeboats. Already the salt in his mouth made his tongue feel dry. When he crested a wave again with enough air not to be panicking for breath, the flares on the lifeboats were as small and dim as stars.

The current had ripped him so far away in moments. He punched his fist to the sky and bent a jet of fire. He kept the flare going as long as his breath would allow, and the waves dropped him under without any air left in his lungs.

Lightning flashed overhead as he broke the surface, got a fraction of the breath he needed before his mouth filled with water that he swallowed, to faster get breath back into his lungs. The waves consumed him five times before he had the breath back to firebend again.

 _He had seen the Fire Nation’s banner under the night sky, red with smoke, covering the Earth King’s palace and felt the satisfaction, bone-deep, hard-won, beholding what he knew was his greatest victory in life._ Destiny could not be denied - and he couldn’t fulfill his destiny if he died here. If he could not see the way out, that was his mortal weakness. 

But he’d never been so near to death. His destiny had never been so difficult to trust.

Lightning flashed again as he bent all his breath out. His flare was smaller than the last, interrupted when a wave greater than all the rest rolled through him and turned him over. When he broke the surface and breathed in the next swallowed him too fast. He inhaled salt water. He found the surface, struggling to clear his nose, struggling to make a path for the breath to come, to find enough to light another signal fire. Lightning flashed one more time, and thunder nearly shattered his ears. The waves lifted him sharply high, and he prepared his roiling stomach for the drop.

He fell down the face of the wave, slammed onto a hard surface and nearly broke his nose on wooden boards.

The deck tossed beneath him as he hacked. A wave washed over, threatening to sweep him back into the open sea. He landed against - against the mast that he could not see, but felt, and a rope being lashed around him, someone tying him to the mast.

 _So this is how I escape death this time,_ he realized, as his destiny became again a certainty. 

Hands grabbed his and pulled his arms tighter around the mast, squeezed his hands in wordless comfort as the breaking waves roared all possibility of speech away. He tightened his grip as the deck tilted beneath him, as he fell back and met the resistance of the rope lashing him to the mast, held on to the mast with all his strength to keep the rope from being the all that separated him from the sea, rattling with every breath as he tried to fully inhale and encountered a bubbling sensation of saltwater clogging his lungs.

The deck pitched one way, and he fell against the mast. His breath rattled in his lungs. The deck pitched another way and tossed him against the rope holding him to the mast. He wondered when he would be helped onto the lifeboat, to sit with his men and be rowed to shore. He fell against the mast once more. 

The deck pitched again. 

And again.

Nothing else happened for hours.

He threw up his dinner, then his lunch, then whatever was left, then nothing at all five times over. The seasickness never ebbed. His head pounded with ceaseless thunder. 

The wind and the water chilled him so deeply that he shivered uncontrollably, even as exhaustion consumed him, until he was so desperate to lie down that he would have let go of the mast and let himself be rolled off into the waves to inhale and drown, but the rope held him up when he half-released. He sucked in a breath as the adrenaline sharpened him awake, then ebbed as he sank back down into the misery of cold and motion and thirst, the salt he’d drunk drying him from the inside out.

Every moment that passed, he was certain he could not survive another moment like the one before. Then that moment passed and he was somehow still alive, still in an agony of cold and thirst and exhaustion, still with waves to contend with, thunder searing his ears and rain falling in sheets.

~~~~

The pounding in his head and the roiling of his stomach was unchanged, but he opened his eyes and saw above him a single round hole in the clouds - the night on the other side purple-blue and full of stars.

The mast stood dark against the circle of clear night, barely swaying. The spinning was no longer from beneath him, but within his pounding head. He glanced to the stern, where the sailor stood with one hand on a line and her other hand on the steering paddle. Her head sagged with exhaustion. She stumbled slightly, waking up again. She slapped her own face sharply and shook her head, turning her darkened face back up to the sail.

He only knew he fell asleep as soon as he’d looked away because it was light with the grey of before-dawn when he opened his eyes again. For the first time in hours, nothing moved. The deck was still beneath him. The rope around him fell loose.

“Arm up,” the sailor said, “C’mon now.’

She pulled his arm over her back to help him stand. He tried to thank her, but his voice was as dry as salt. He stumbled off the deck and onto sand, made it a few steps and fell prone, head pounding.

A pulling sensation, deep inside him, unexpected and deeply alien. He coughed like his lungs were turning inside-out and water splattered the sand. He breathed in, suddenly clear and deep.

Desperate to sleep but thirsty beyond rest, he rose up on his elbows. He began to ask for water, but her hand was already at his mouth, full of -

He pulled her hand to his lips and drank down what she offered, cool and sweeter than water ever tasted. He hadn’t even finished asking for more before she held both out to him, her cupped hands brimming with sweetness.

He drank what she offered until he couldn’t keep upright anymore. He sensed more than heard her collapse beside him on the sand. There was no holding out. He fell into sleep like he’d fallen into the sea, powerless not to.

——

A/N: Up next: the beginning of a long Beach Episode.


	3. You Don't Want to Hurt Me Baby, You Don't Want to Make Me Cry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: So as this story goes on, sort of starting in this chapter, there is going to be arguing between a colonialist and a native-coded woman about whether or not colonialism is bad. Given that the pro-colonialism arguments are coming from a character who's eventually going to become a beloved and enlightened mentor figure, that might be uncomfortable to read and I understand it! The thesis of this story is that Iroh spent almost all of his life wrapped up in cognitive dissonance, skillfully making the world a worse place while perceiving himself as a hero, so I just wanna be up front about a few things: Colonialism and imperialism sucks, Iroh, while in many ways always a likable and kind person, is still a villain at this point in time no matter how good he is at convincing himself otherwise, and no native coded women written by me are going to die, go to jail, or agree that colonialism is good.
> 
> I am interested in the transition during Iroh's life from perceiving himself as a just hero with a grand destiny to realizing that he has, at least until the events of canon, always been a villain. This story is part of that overall tale. With sensitive cultural themes upcoming I just wanted to make the course I'm charting clear.
> 
> The chapter title is taken from Castaway, by King Deco.

Iroh woke up automatically with the sunrise.

The sound of the sea was a long, slow rush of waves curling gently, like meditative breath, slow in and slower out. His damp clothes itched with drying salt water. The sailor was still passed out face-down on the sand beside him. 

He sat up and stripped his sand-caked layers as he surveyed the beach. The sailor had beached her boat on the white sand, where the ebbing tide left it high on the shore. The beach was narrow, palm trees and dense jungle growing a few yards from the water. South, a low outcropping of dark rock cut the beach off, jutting into the bay. Waves flowed over in a periodic rush that had left it porous, and hermit shrimp flickered in and out of the limestone. Beyond that the bay coast ran on for miles in a curve west, rising into towering black cliffs. North, the arm of the bay stretched a mile of white sand out to a reef where waves broke in towers of whitewater. The waves that reached the beach were clear and sparkling fingerlings of energy, folding gently over themselves in sand full of broken shells and fragments of coral.

The beauty of the bay under sunrise didn't escape him, but he was thirsty again, itching with salt, hungry and exhausted. He could have dropped back to the sand and gone right back to sleep, but the rising sun would soon be overhead, burning him and the sailor as she slept.

Iroh regarded the unconscious woman for a moment. Her long-sleeved uniform covered her skin, and her hair covered her ears. She wouldn’t burn if he left her for the shade.

But the heat of direct sunlight would wake her up sooner than later. He could wake her and walk her to the shade, but she had saved his life not once, but minute after minute, hour after hour through the previous night. His sleep on the fastboat hadn’t been restful, but he’d still had any at all, while she’d been slapping herself to stay awake and sail him to safety through a hurricane. It would be inconsiderate to wake her unnecessarily. 

Iroh set off for the jungle to build her a shade.

The forest had plenty of bamboo to choose from. He seared a flexible green staff into three pieces, and seared two pieces at an angle so that they stabbed deeply and easily into the sand. He burned holes through the third bamboo staff so that it wedged firmly on the other two, then laid his robe over the light frame. The shallow lean-to wouldn’t have kept a drop of rain off them, but it shaded the woman, and cast enough for him to lie in too. 

He spread his less sandy inner clothes on the sand and lay shirtless next to her, still in the light trousers he’d kept underneath the stolen Earth Kingdom robes. Thirsty as he was, he still drifted easily into the sleep he needed, breathing with the soft tumbling of the waves.

~~~~

He awoke with the sun nearly overhead, barely still in the shade. A breeze rustled the palm trees against the blue sky. The sailor was not next to him.

He sat up, his mouth blazing hot with thirst, and looked down the beach. The fastboat was still high on the sand, a familiar folded green uniform on the deck. On the other side of the fastboat, the sailor stood with her back to him knee-deep in the shallow water, wearing only a spring green sarong as a short dress as she showered, rinsing out her long, dark brown hair _under a raincloud sized for a single person._

The pieces clicked into place. 

There was no salt-reactive air-cooling formula. This woman had not been hired for her ability to pull an oar, even if she’d done so in the course of her work.

She turned to him, her eyes distinctly blue, bright even at this distance. Iroh was shocked he hadn’t put those pieces together sooner, now that they formed the picture in front of him.

“Mornin’,” she said. She looked his shirtlessness up and down, not bothering to disguise her approval. His shock gave way just enough for him to return her open look of appreciation. The waterbender had hidden a wide-hipped figure under her uniform, and a waist-length fall of dark brown hair beneath her hat. She was an enemy of his people and she was beautiful, water running all down her dark skin. “Thanks for the shade. You must be salty. Want to rinse off?”

He had faced so many waterbenders on the road from Fort Iruka to Leijiang. None of them had been beautiful women, smiling, their hands outheld, inviting him to shower with them.

“Sure,” he said, his mouth catching up to his eyes. His skin itched with salt and sand. He walked around the fastboat to stand nearer and the waterbender shifted smoothly around with her wrists limp, lifting and upturning her hands so gently that he felt certain the raincloud would not respond to such a gentle suggestion. But the cloud that had poured down on her floated to him, and ran gentle, cool fresh water through his hair and down his shoulders.

He sighed at the relief of the salt being washed from his skin, yet nearly shuddered at the sudden terror of allowing a waterbender to bring water in such close proximity to his body. In absolute vulnerability he stood, letting the water wash him clean at this woman’s command, this woman who’d saved his life, without knowing whose life she had in her enemy hands.

If she knew who she held so vulnerably in her grasp, would the raindrops turn to daggers?

His heart beat so fast as the cool rain washed him clean that he thought he might stop breathing. He stepped out of the shower, reaching up to run a hand over his hair, askew from its Earth Kingdom style bun. He tore his hair down and, as she kept smiling so bright eyed and charming, tilted his head into her raincloud once more to let the fresh water slick his black hair down his back and over his shoulders.

The peasant sailor who had no idea how much of a fugitive she had just become shifted out of her stance and dissipated the raincloud, drawing her graceful hands back down to her hips. “First of all,” she said, in a comforting tone, “Everyone else got on the lifeboats safely so you don’t have to worry about your friends.”

Her assurance struck him, as he thought of Huaji bleeding on his shoulder. She couldn’t know for certain he was all right -

“The oarsmen kept them out of the current that caught you, so they should make landfall by sunrise,” she said. 

That was more promising than if the sergeant had no hope of reaching landfall at all. Iroh breathed deeply against his recollection of the night. 

“You took your time finding that flare,” the waterbender said. “Good thing you still had it. What happened to your float vest?”

She’d mistaken his firebending for the flares. He opened his mouth to say - to say what? But she waved him off.

“Oh it doesn’t matter. Nobody died. Second thing, is -” she smiled an apologetic, appeasing smile. “We’re gonna be here for a while.”

“How long is a while?” he asked. She didn’t know he was a firebender, and she didn’t know he was the Crown Prince, so what motive would she have to lie?

“The currents around these islands are . . . unique,” she said, gently. “In about a month they’ll shift towards the mainland instead of away from it, but if we try to leave now, best case scenario, the wind is not _entirely_ against us and nothing goes wrong and we’re still out of provisions by the time we tack into Changbao. Worst case scenario the wind and the currents are both entirely against us and and we get swept out to open sea.”

 _A month. A month?_ He couldn’t be AWOL for a month. He'd miss the anniversary. He might even miss the end of the Leijiang campaign. He looked at the tiny sailboat and the thought of being stuck on it in the open sea almost made his headache return. “Could a powerboat cut through these unique currents?”

“Well sure, but I don’t think we’re gonna _get_ any powerboats out here,” the sailor said. “Ain’t no shippin’ lanes runnin’ south, and the water to the north is too shallow for Fire Nation boats for miles.”

“Will your crew know to search this part of the sea?”

“Sure they will, but if you got a handful of rice and one grain had an ant on it, and you scattered that handful on your kitchen floor, could you pick out the grain with the ant? ‘Cause that’s what the islands are like here.” There was sympathy, but amusement, in her smile. “Don’t worry about it. I’m still employed by the Swordfish, you’re still an honored guest, and I ain’t gonna let an honored guest die out here.” She grinned, confidence in her smile. “Trust me. You couldn’t ask be stuck on a deserted island with a better companion.”

He nodded.

“Because you’re a waterbender.” No wonder the company had such a strong reputation for speed and safety. No wonder she’d picked him up and sailed successfully in the middle of a storm, no wonder he’d coughed all that water up, no wonder the air belowdeck had always been so cool - 

“How’d you guess?” she asked. 

She swept through a form. Several mangoes laid out on a banana leaf next to her suddenly shriveled, yellow juice flowing around her in a spiral to pool in a sphere over her fingertips. 

“You must be thirsty." She held her hand out to him. “Hope you like mango juice. It’s the end of the season, so we better go through ‘em before they rot.”

 _Did anybody not like mango juice,_ Iroh wondered, realizing that he must have still been staring in frankly undignified surprise. He stepped forward, staring at the sphere of juice, wondering how one drank without drinking from a cup -

He put his hand underneath hers, tipping her fingers just slightly closer to his mouth so he could watch her for judgment as he touched his lips to the sphere. She’d cooled the juice until it was nearly ice. The refreshing shock sent him reeling back a moment before he leaned in to finish. He _was_ parched.

Her smile never wavered as he finished his drink. She seemed pleased by the chance to show her skill. “You look like you seen a ghost. Never met a waterbender before?”

She asked it as a joke, as if _of course he hadn't_ , but he had. Iroh struggled over the memory of the last waterbender he’d met, painted like a wolf and screaming in his armor. The battles on the road to Leijiang reinforced the respect he maintained for the Northern warriors, despite their barbaric ways. He’d met waterbenders alright, but never one half-dressed with a smile on her face, offering him cool sweet refreshment, having just saved his life. 

When he didn’t answer, she went on in that same playful lilt. “I’d have kept it secret, but there’s no way we’re gonna survive here if I don’t do any bending, and I figure there’s no Fire Nation around for you to sell me out to -”

He did the math on lying. She _couldn’t_ find out his identity, not when she was in the perfect position to execute him, or abandon him to death, or take him as a hostage, or leave him to return with reinforcements, but the best lies were mostly true. The more truth he told her, the less likely she’d be to look for the entire truth. 

A skilled waterbender on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean, who knew how to sail the only boat available, as well as possibly the only source of drinking water - if she decided to take him hostage, he wouldn’t be in much of a position to bargain his way out. She could want vengeance upon the Fire Nation. She could decide to try and kill him, but even in the middle of the ocean, a waterbender was vulnerable to lightning - and often surprised by it.

She was still letting him hold her hand. Her eyes were fixed on his, her smile appealing, the way a woman smiled at a man she was happy to have the prospect of uninterrupted time with.

He smiled back, happy to have been saved by her.

He needed her to trust him, and he needed her not to think there were any questions left for her to ask.

“Since we’re being honest -” he said, stepping back, taking a defenseless position, his hands held up in surrender. “I have no intention of selling you out to anyone, but -” he ignited a flame over his palm.

The quantity of fear that filled her face probably shouldn’t have surprised him. She backed up in a defensive stance, the sea rushing up around her shoulders and arms.

“Please, stop!” he said, cutting the flame off. He knelt before the woman. “I’m not stupid enough to try and fight a powerful waterbender in the middle of the ocean.” 

He waited to see if the flattery had landed. She didn’t come out of her defensive stance, but she didn’t move to attack him, either. 

“If we’re going to be here a while,” he said, “We ought to trust each other. You trusted me with your identity. It’s only right I trust you with mine.” At least partly. “Surviving will be more comfortable if I don’t have to pretend to light every fire by hand.”

She breathed heavily, but relaxed by a fraction. A few breaths in, she said, “Just so we’re clear, I’m gonna drop you off a whole day’s walk from any port.” The coat of water over her arms and shoulders stayed, shifting. A few black-and-white striped fish swam through it.

“So long as I’m alive, you can drop me as many days’ walk away as you think is fair,” Iroh agreed.

She held her position another few seconds. Then she relaxed, the sea pouring off her shoulders. She covered her mouth with one hand, eyes wide and staring into the water. She pointed at him. “You better not even think of hurtin’ me,” she said. “There’s no fresh spring on this here rock and all the mangos’ll go bad before the month’s out if I don’t take the water out of ‘em.”

“My life is in your hands,” he agreed. She had no idea how many people would have sacrificed their own allies to be in her position. This common sailor suddenly held a significant percentage of the power of the world, and she’d never be aware that she did.

He went back to appreciating her near-naked form. Technically, whether she knew it or not, she held him prisoner. Being a prisoner missing in action usually did not involve being held hostage by a pretty woman in beachwear. More people would go missing in action if it did, he thought, and and chuckled at the joke.

“What’s so funny?” she asked, warily. “I ain’t kidding! You ain’t gonna have an easy time here if you do anything shifty.”

“No, I know that,” he said, reassuring. “I was thinking that you did a good job until now of covering up how beautiful you are.”

She blushed, looking to the side wide-eyed, but her half-smile as she looked back at him was self-assured. “Aww, you noticed.”

“Beautiful and funny _and_ a powerful bender?” Iroh gave her his most charming smile. “If every captor had your qualities, more men would go missing in action.”

She was trying to frown but smiled anyway. “Are you this sweet to all your enemies or should I be flattered?” 

If he was finding it a bit exciting to be at the mercy of a powerful and beautiful woman, maybe she hadn’t missed that she had power over him, and maybe she was a little bit excited by that too. That just excited him a little more. He composed himself with a breath. “Who says we’re enemies?”

“Everything the Fire Nation’s done to the southern tribe,” she said, with a tone of ‘obviously.'

“I haven’t done anything,” Iroh pointed out. He hadn’t. The southern campaign was his father’s life’s work. Ba Sing Se would be his. “Maybe I was omitting things when we met, but nothing I have ever said to you hasn’t been true.”

The waterbender pushed a lock of wet hair back over her shoulder. “What’s your name?”

This was a risk - but if this month went as he hoped it would, if she were ever breathlessly gasping a name to him, he wanted his true one from her mouth. “Iroh.”

She didn’t show any recognition. His name wasn’t well spread among the Earth Kingdom. His title tended to get whispered more, and sons of the Fire Nation were still often named as he was, in honor of the hero his maternal great-great grandfather had been. 

“I’m Sana,” she said. “Sana Bel.”

“Sana Bel,” he repeated. “It’s a pleasure to be your prisoner.”

She covered her mouth again and looked away, absolutely failing to conceal her smile, her hand on her hip, her stance no longer defensive but canted to show off the curve of her hip. She had to know that was one of her best features. Common women who knew their beauty were an incredible amount of fun.

“We’re in an unusual position,” he pointed out. “I’m not sure when the last time was that a waterbender and a Fire Nation soldier found themselves in such close company.”

“I suppose,” she said, playing with the hem of her fringed sarong.

“Did your crew know?”

Her expression flattened. “No they did not,” she said, in a way that told him yes, they definitely knew, but she wasn’t going to sell them out by admitting it.

“How could they not?”

“You will never hear me say it,” she promised.

He decided to leave off that tack. She was not from the north. She was not from the south. Another tribe of waterbenders existed somewhere in the Earth Kingdom and he was primed to find out about it. He might not have an air cooling system to bring to his father, but he could have something even more monumental.

“Fair enough,” he said. “But how did you end up working for an Earth Kingdom ferry? Your tribe can’t be from this coast, everyone would know about a third Water Tribe.”

Her eyes widened in panic as he mentioned her tribe. “I’m from the Northern tribe,” she blurted out. “I dunno what you mean, third.”

“With that accent?” he chided.

“All northern water tribe folk talk like this,” she lied.

“None of the Northern Water Tribe men I’ve fought did.”

She cast her glance aside. “Fine,” she said, with an air of admission. “I only learned from the Northern Tribe. My folks was real surprised when I turned out to bend the wrong element, so they sent me north to train.”

“Uh huh.” Iroh smiled at the lie. “That must have been quite the shock, a waterbender born to Earth Kingdom parents.”

“Oh, it was,” she confirmed, nodding.

“Must have been even more of a shock when you went all the way to the Northern Water Tribe just to find out they don’t train their women,” Iroh said, chuckling a little as he crossed his arms.

Sana deflated as her lie lost its last breath of life. “So you know about that,” she muttered, defeated.

Avatar Roku had written of it extensively, this dishonor afforded to Northern Water Tribeswomen. “Avatar Roku wondered in his journals, had he been born female, would they have taught him?”

Sana frowned, and looked away. “You ain’t gonna find out where I’m from,” she stated, flatly. “You should get used to that.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Are you composing your ransom note in your mind?”

She looked surprised. “I ain’t gonna ransom you,” she said.

“You could make a fair amount of money,” he said. That was a lie. She’d only be killed for her impertinence. “I’m noble born.” That was an understatement.

She looked mildly insulted. “That ain’t right. Who do you think I am?”

He raised his hands. “Not a ruthless pirate, I suppose! Can you blame me for asking?”

She softened. She looked out to sea.

“I’m gonna keep you alive,” she declared. “I ain’t a murderer. But I ain’t gonna trust you none, not when I know what you done to my kin in the south!”

“Again, not me,” he pointed out.

“I ain’t risking my freedom for no man.”

“Nor would I,” he agreed.

“If you get that, we can - well we can get through this month fine,” she said. 

This would be the ultimate test of his ability to charm people who were not already obligated to like him. “I hope we can,” he agreed, smiling at her. “I'd hate to know a woman as beautiful as you and not be able to get along with her.”

She looked aside, fire beneath her dark cheeks again.

He cleared his throat softly. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’m still thirsty.”

“Oh.” She dropped her uncertainty and swirled her arm about herself, pulling water straight from the humid air. He understood - seeing a person in need, hearing a request for help, and not granting it? He had no idea how others did it. She might feel the same.

The sphere of water hovered over her fingertips. He put his hand under hers, and tilted her fingertips up to bring the water to his lips. The art of sipping out of the air was easy to master, and he drank from midair over her fingertips, his hand just touching hers. When the sphere of water was all sipped up, and he still had her fingers in his hand, he caught her brilliant blue gaze and kissed her fingertips, soft and deliberately.

The blush spread across her cheekbones again, her eyes wide and still astonished.

She withdrew her fingertips from his hand, inhaled slowly. “You can do that again,” she said.

Her smile was growing as she walked past him to the fastboat.

Iroh felt good about his prospects for the island.

——

A/N: I made a lot of Florida Woman jokes on my tumblr leading up to this chapter, but in all seriousness, I wish I saw more in fandom about the Foggy Swamp waterbenders, and that we’d gotten more in canon about their culture. I plan to draw from Gulf Coast first nations people to write about the different bands that make up the tribe.

Sana’s name is completely a Florida Woman joke though and if I’m honest this won’t be the last one.


	4. Of All the Strangers You're the Strangest That I've Seen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title comes from The Stranger, by Lord Huron.

They ate dehydrated mangoes for breakfast as Sana spread the contents of her ditch kit on the deck of the fastboat.

“Well, this is what we got to survive with,” she said, paring a sliver of dried mango off the pit with the knife from her kit and handing it to Iroh. 

He took the mango gratefully as she laid out a set of needles and thread for sailmending, an anchor with a line, spare rope, a sharpening stone, enough medical supplies to treat small wounds and splint a broken limb, a little soap, camellia oil, and sun-protection paste, a fine net to ward off insects, two flares, a fishing kit, flint and oil-soaked tinder.

Sana looked from the firestarting kit to Iroh, who chuckled. “See? I may be useful to you yet.”

Sana shrugged over the extraneous firestarting kit and went on laying out her supplies - a tarp, a wide metal bowl, her own float vest with three more flares, a whistle, a signaling mirror, and one more spare vest.

“By the way,” Sana said, holding the yellow cork vest, looking at Iroh meaningfully. “Where was yours?”

His chuckle was bashful this time. “I didn’t expect to be _in_ the water, just on top of it.”

“That’s why we have them,” Sana scolded. “No one _plans_ to get swept overboard. AND you were the last one on the boat! What were you getting, if not your vest?”

“My sergeant,” Iroh said. “He was injured.”

Sana blinked, seriousness replacing her scolding expression. “Well,” she said, thoughtfully, “That was brave of you.” She shook her finger at him anyway. “And dangerous! Think what would have happened if you couldn’t firebend! How would I have spotted you?”

“Next time I’m at sea in a typhoon, I’ll put the vest on before I go running back for my men,” he promised.

“You better.” Sana patted her last item, a provision box of dehydrated taro and sweet potato, and Iroh was glad for the mango season as she handed him another slice. “Anyway, that’s it,” she said. “That’s gotta get us through the month.” 

All Iroh had retained from the boat was the seal that confirmed his identity, hanging from a cord around his neck. He thought of the pouch of jasmine tea he’d put in the pocket of his jacket, the one he’d left floating somewhere in the open sea. “I would have liked to make you tea to thank you for saving my life,” he sighed.

“You can make it up to me when we get back to the Earth Kingdom,” she said, absentmindedly. Then her thoughts caught up with her mouth and her smile disappeared. “IF I were ever gonna see you again once I got you back to the Earth Kingdom,” she amended, trying to sound fierce again.

“Of course. I must make it up to you some other way,” Iroh agreed, only smiling at her in return. “I have a month to figure something out.”

He repositioned himself on the deck, let his fingers brush hers, and let them stay there.

Sana caught his gaze. She’d put a wall around herself since the revelation that he was Fire Nation, and though she didn’t pull her hand away, there was still tension in her regard for him that hadn’t been there before.

“Your captain had rules for everything, did she think to give you rules for time alone in the middle of nowhere with a guest you’ll never see again?” he asked. 

“She didn’t have rules for _everything,_ ” Sana amended. “She didn’t think about weeks alone on an island.” She glanced from his hand touching hers up to catch his gaze again. “Otherwise she would have definitely made rules for how you don’t pass the time when you’re going to be all alone together.”

“What was it you and the captain were arguing about, anyway?” Iroh asked. His curiosity had never abated. “Can I take a guess?”

Sana looked away. “I bet you _have_ figured it out,” she said.

“Then I guess Captain Fang was about to start doing business in the Colonies.”

The waterbender sighed. “You’ve got it,” she said. She withdrew her hand after all.

“No wonder you were upset,” Iroh said. “You’d have been closer than ever to being imprisoned.”

Sana looked at him again. “That’s mighty understandin’ of _you_ to say,” she said.

“She chose money over your freedom,” Iroh went on. He’d never had to think like a waterbender who was more or less neutral in their war, but the exercise wasn’t hard, when the waterbender in question so clearly valued her freedom.

“Mmhm,” Sana agreed, chewing on a piece of mango. “The tropical provinces get most of their business from the colonies these days and the captain’s got a lot of wages to pay.” She paused. She looked angry, but said, “I can’t really get angry at her.”

“I thought you were, when I saw you arguing.”

“What, do you want me to get angry at her?” Sana looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “Ain’t you under some kinda law to turn me over to your Fire Lord if I give you half a chance?”

“I’ve got no interest in seeing you in prison,” he said, and meant it. A northern or southern waterbender, primed by the unforgiving ice to perpetually battle for survival, was oonly no threat to the Fire Nation in prison. A lone woman from some backwoods tribe that had never done any conquest worth noting, who saved his life without attacking when she found out whose life she’d saved, was no threat at all.

“Oh yeah?” she asked. “Then what are you gonna tell your friends, when I drop you off and you find ‘em again?”

Any common soldier would have been guilty of treason for leaving her alive, but he was no common soldier, and these were unusual circumstances. He could argue his logic to the Fire Lord, and Azulon would agree with him - as long as he told the version of events the Fire Lord and the rest of his nation would want to hear. “I could tell them I killed you,” he suggested. When she returned him to the Earth Kingdom, perhaps he could convince her to give him some token of her people to bring to his father. He could add The Last Known Southern Waterbender to his list of conquests his father was better not knowing the truth about. “No one would come looking for you then.”

“I suppose that’d work,” she said, but her death was what not he wanted her contemplating, and not what he wanted to contemplate.

“You saved my life,” he pointed out, putting his hand over hers to squeeze gently. “The very least I can do to thank you is make sure you get to keep your freedom.” He waited until she looked up to catch her eye, so she got to see his earnest smile. “There’s the rule of the Fire Lord, and then there’s the rule of honor.” Any other Fire Nation man had to consider them the same, but he was not any Fire Nation man. “If this isn’t a ‘rule of honor’ situation, then I don’t have any.”

She accepted this, smiling wordlessly and turning her hand to draw her fingertips across his palm. A soft breeze fanned the cool water still drying on Iroh’s skin, and made her drying hair wave around her shoulders.

Iroh could barely contain his delight. To think, the day before he’d been juggling his men’s frustration and his own, on the way to a series of stiff formality after stiff formality under his father’s exacting scrutiny. Now the only thing he had to be responsible for was a beautiful woman’s secret, far down the line enough to come up with the right cover story.

“If the captain _had_ made rules to apply to our situation,” Iroh asked, running a finger down the outside curve of her thumb, “Given the situation she was putting you in - would you obey them?”

A smile broke again on Sana’s face. She exhaled, relaxing from her tension. “Not this time,” she said, sliding in a little closer, putting her free hand on his. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You’re not very upset about being lost at sea,” she pointed out.

“Neither are you.”

“I’m at home here.” She did look it, relaxed and refreshed with the breeze on her skin and her long hair let down. “I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else.”

“Just now, neither would I.”

Sana held out only a moment longer before leaning in to kiss him first, with all the pleasant boldness of a peasant woman who could cast off whatever rules didn’t suit her whenever she felt like it.

It had been too long since he’d had a woman’s company. Iroh kissed her back, sliding closer to put his hand on her soft cheek. That first kiss turned into two, three. He suspected that based on the captain’s rules, it had been too long for Sana since a man had kept her in pleasant company.

“I really don’t want the Fire Lord to find out about you,” he said, smiling against her lips, feeling her smile back. 

They made out through the morning, since there wasn’t a reason to do anything else.

On the sand by the fastboat, in the shade cast by the sail with the sound of the gently waving sea and the breeze blowing fresh and cool, Iroh enjoyed in the change in his fortune. From a a night of the purest misery he’d ever felt, nearly dead again and again in the raging sea, to reclining on a beach with no obligations but to enjoy the company of the first beautiful woman he’d been left alone with in months. Every sweet sensation was the sweeter for the stark contrast, for the lack of anything to be done but pass the time until this luxurious lack of obligation was over. 

Sure there were no silk sheets or fine dining or even morning tea out here, but back in the Fire Nation, there wasn’t a jungle full of fresh fruit, a sea full of fresh fish, and a lovely woman who’d saved his life so that he could go on enjoying all his nation’s fine luxuries once he got back to them. 

She had any number of ways she could ask him to thank her for it, and all the time to ask in.

Sana leaned against him as he sat against the outrigger, her left hand caressing his neck and chest as she leaned on her right and slipped her lower lip gently between his. His left leg was falling asleep under the pressure of her thigh, but when he took his hands from her neck and moved them to her hips, she slipped her hands under his and drew them back up to her shoulders.

“Not today,” she said. “We’re going to be here a while, remember?”

He chuckled at the reminder. “All right, but my leg’s falling asleep.”

“Oh!” She let out a puff of air and repositioned. “Why didn’tcha say?”

“And interrupt this?”

“Fair enough.”

She dove back in to capture his bottom lip between hers, and Iroh heaved a sigh of contentment as the morning went on.

He noticed the sweat gathering on her skin as the sun (and temperature) rose, but didn’t think anything of it until, releasing his lips, she leaned back and fanned herself with one hand, taking his hand from her back with the other. She exhaled loudly, her face flushed, pushing damp hair back from her forehead.

“I’m burning up.” She looked him up and down with surprise. “You’re not even sweating. HOW are you not sweating?”

He was venting excess heat, of course, and hadn’t even thought to say otherwise. A woman from the Fire Nation would have expected. “Burning up never bothered me,” he said, and found himself chuckling as her blank stare turned into a giggle and a little roll of her eyes.

“Of course. Well I need to cool off,” she said, standing up, sand caking her legs. “I’m going swimming. Wanna join me?”

“I’ve had enough being wet for one lifetime,” he said, stomach turning slightly at even the memory of the journey by sailboat.

“Cannot relate even a little bit,” Sana said. “Suit yourself.”

He hated to see her go, but didn’t mind watching as she jogged to the rock that jutted out into the bay.

~~~~

The limestone was rough on her bare feet as Sana picked her way along carefully to deeper water. She wished again that Captain Fang had let her not wear shoes on the Swordfish, but the captain had no consideration for whether or not someone’s feet got soft in her service. Walking on the rough stone out to the drop-off into the bay would fix that in a month, surely. Her spirits were light as she leaped off the black rock, a fathom down to the water.

The heat, her sweat, and gut-twisting sensation of falling disappeared so blissfully once the water caught her. Sana plunged into the moment of suspension as her momentum gave in to the water’s embrace, when every part of her body was even less than weightless, entirely supported. Even the soles of her feet felt free. 

She bobbed to the surface without a kick, buoyant as cork in the salt water. She floated at the surface, eyes adjusting to the sting of salt water, and took in the seabed. Layer upon layer of green and tan coral fans stacked on top of each other, rising up to her right to support the shallow, sandy bay of the beach, slanting down to her left to a sandy plain about ten fathoms down. The water was so clear that she’d mistaken the depth for half at the surface, but fish swam at all depths, giving her a scale to judge by. 

Palm-sized damselfish striped in yellow and white flitted around her feet, and a school of lemon yellow, lightning-blue-striped snapper hovered in a canyon in the coral, cleaner wrasse flitting around the bigger fish in flashes of black and blue. A pair of pompanos, plate-sized and glittering silver like mirrors, swam over the blue dropoff. Damselfish in flashing from jade green to platinum-silver glinted in and out of focus at all depths, and at least ten parrotfish in as many colors as she’d ever seen in flowers crunched on the coral. In the deep blue water, fish about the length of her arm swam in schools, not quite identifiable at depth. 

The variety of fish was beautiful _and_ reassuring. The abundance of green coconuts and mango immediately near shore were promising too. If she went inland, there would likely be breadfruit, papaya, calamansi, taro - they weren’t going to starve, and they weren’t going to get bored with their food right away.

The reef stretching before her into blue oblivion invited Sana to swim. She took off along the ridge of coral, towards the north arm of the bay. She had so much steam to burn off before she could dive effectively that the far side barely looked far enough. 

She stretched her arms and rolled from side to side, leaning leisurely into the long movements. It had been so long since she’d had time just to enjoy being in the water. Maybe it had been too long for a while now. Maybe she had been closer than ready to quit the Swordfish than she’d known.

She kept her eyes open in the stinging salt as she pulled herself gently across the surface of the water. The sandy shelf to her left disappeared as the coral ledge became a true dropoff into blue nothing. Shelves of coral stretched up to her right, pale green fans stacked in towers, blocks of shimmering blue-purple round coral and pops of pale pink branch coral interrupting the fans. A trio of bluefin jacks jetted away from her to join the other obscured fish in the depths. A sudden school of forearm-long fish with needle-long bodies surrounded her at the surface, cerulean blue and purple darts bobbing with the waves and staring her right in the eye one after another as they circled her. A dozen squid the length of her hand rushed to the shallow right-hand reef out of the deep. A turtleray appeared out of the illuminated blue, shell a glowing blue-black, fins inky and spotted with white, passing by to the shallows behind her. The ‘ray was so majestic that even she felt clumsy, sharing the water with it. 

It was, as always, freeing without equal, strange and beautiful and utterly fantastic compared to life on land, like flying above a city of spirit creatures.

The beauty of the undersea world distracted her from the moment, as it always did, but this time all she had to do was think of the man she’d left at the surface and she felt like a pot about to boil over again. She swam harder, the coral disappearing as she pulled into deeper water. The blue, bottomless and without a border she could see, filled her eyes and her mind, so soothing when she needed to be soothed.

It was wonderful to need soothing from too many _good_ emotions, for a change. It had been so hard to convince herself to take Iroh’s hands off her body every time he’d gone wandering, when she thought of the leaves so considerately arranged for shade without waking her, the locking of his amber eyes on hers as he kissed her fingertips - all the way back to when he’d helped her help his seasick companion and she’d thought what a considerate man he seemed, and wondered if she was right. 

He carried himself like nothing bad had ever happened to him and nothing bad ever would. He still did it, even with a night of nearly dying at sea behind him. That positivity he gave off hooked into her attention on the Swordfish and hadn’t let go,when she’d been going quietly about her paddling shifts and boat checks on her sandeq while he socialized with classier people than her, while his laugh seemed to reach her from any corner of the deck. His confidence was so absolute that it had taken her a few days to even realize she was a full head taller than him. 

When she’d woken up on the beach under a considerate shade next to him half-naked and as muscular as an oarsman, she’d wondered if he was an earthbender before realizing an earthbender would just have (presumably) made her a shade out of stone. She’d wanted to slide right over and use him as a pillow then. She wondered if he’d let her tonight, when the sun went down and the air cooled.

She paused swimming just to roll on her back and inhale fully, glee filling her from her fingertips to her toes. She stretched her whole body in delight, flipping backwards to spiral through the water. _Nobody could tell her not to let him touch her._ Nobody could tell her not to let his hands wander wherever she wanted them to. Captain Fang was very firm on the subject of flirting with passengers. She was equally firm on passengers not flirting with crew. Those policies were fine until a handsome man with an easy smile who laughed at her jokes and attended to his friends with enough care to risk his life for one came aboard. They were good until the months went by and she realized how many of them had passed when the only people she’d met were crew OR passengers, when there didn’t seem to be time in those months for anything but work, and certainly not for a man’s private company.

Captain Fang would not have been considerate of the circumstances if she heard that Sana had spent the morning nearly in the lap of a passenger whose life was in her hands. She wouldn’t have accepted ‘We almost died’ as an excuse, she wouldn’t have accepted ‘but it’s been so long,’ she wouldn’t have accepted ‘but he laughs at all my jokes.’ She would only see that the ship’s reputation, the company’s reputation, the crew’s reputation was in Sana’s hands and Sana was using them to run them all over a passenger’s broad shoulders and down his thick chest, to feel a furnace there so hot that her skin seemed cold in comparison. 

Well she _had_ almost died. She had saved his life and now she had a while of life preserving ahead of her to do, and she wanted _comfort_ as she did it. She wanted his arms around her while she enjoyed still being alive to swim through the soothing blue and contemplate the anger of a woman who wasn’t even concerned with Sana’s safety when it came down to it -

Sana’s excitement cooled as her mind landed on the irony that the Captain might fire her for acting on her crush a passenger, while Sana was ready to quit because the Captain was about to do business with the nation that passenger was from.

 _It’s different,_ she told herself. It was different for her to enjoy still being alive after a terrible ordeal with a specific man who’d promised not to hurt her than it was for the Captain to know that one of her crew was a waterbender, and still be making the connections to do business in the Fire Nation colonies. The Colonies were full of firebenders who weren't considerate and good humored, who stood to gain a lot of money, or status, or whatever fire nation colonialists stood to gain in selling a waterbender out to the Fire Lord.  
Sana returned to her even strokes and her stare down into the endless, soothing blue, blotting her thoughts out with the sound of splashing. One man wasn’t a nation. One man could shade her while she was asleep and thank her kindly with a handsome smile, even if he was from a nation that would put her in a dry jail forever. He wasn’t making that choice to jail her.

She deserved to enjoy still being among the living.

She sped up, sprinting through the open sea until she reached the breaking reef, then turned around and sprinted again through the water until she had to breathe with every stroke, instead of every seventh, then fifth, then third. She alternated her sprints with leisurely strokes until she felt raced to her satisfaction.  
The coral ridge rose up beneath her again, the needle-nosed blue and purple fish schooling around her again, a school of bright yellow leaf-shaped fish flashing at the edge of the reef. A reef shark swam away from her, its black-pointed fins so dark they seemed to drink sunlight, graceful and beautiful as a whisper. Sana passed the shark, and fish after fish as she swam back to the limestone dropoff. 

She surfaced and breathed in time to see a stream of fire roll out over the sea - too high overhead for her to imagine it was an attack, thank goodness, otherwise her heart rate would have gone all the way back up.

She had never seen firebending before. It was astonishing to watch something she’d only seen in a cozy campfire roll through the sky like a sped-up cloud, the heat touching her face even at this distance. On the white sand beach, Iroh stood in a low stance, his movements whip-fast and forceful and very rote, as he punched roiling cloud after cloud of fire over the water with the same ease she would move through Hands-Like-Clouds when she did her evening practice. She watched for a full minute before he noticed her watching, and stood up to wave. She could imagine his smile even if she couldn’t see it at this distance - she liked imagining it, and she waved back.

Iroh went back to his practice, but now he was absolutely showing off, punching shot after shot of fire like arrows _far_ over the sea, brighter and somehow _harder_ looking than his previous clouds. The fire dissipated so much farther from him than she’d assumed a firebender could keep a fire alight with no fuel. Firebending had always sounded like such an abstract mystery, and a hard one to take all that seriously. Water, earth, and air were always present whether they were being bent or not, but firebenders produced and sustained their own element. Without fuel or concentration, it just went away. How could firebenders sustain their element out of nothing for long enough to do the damage she’d heard over and over once she left the swamp that they were renowned for doing? 

Well here a firebender was, moving fast and precise as a striking snake-o-dile, filling the sky with heat and clean, smokeless flame so forceful that there was a roar in the air when he spun into a kick that arced a fiery crescent over the bay.

He didn’t make firebending look _easy_. He just looked powerful.

She’d never questioned whether or not she could defend herself against him, when she’d had her doubts about firebending in the back of her mind. He’d encouraged them when he knelt before her on the beach, called her too powerful to fight in the middle of the ocean, but now she truly wondered how it would pan out if they fought. If he decided to surprise her.

It was a frightening thought.

He hadn’t had to tell her what he was, though. He could have lied and gone on pretending to be an Earth Kingdom merchant, waited until she brought him back to the mainland to reveal himself and compromise her while she was surprised. He’d have gotten her into a Fire Nation prison that way, and gotten himself whatever it was that made Fire Nation soldiers so determined to brave the south pole and die stealing waterbenders from their strongholds in the ice.

But he’d been honest with her. He said a lot of things that were nice to hear from a man she probably should only think of as an enemy.

 _One man is not a whole nation,_ she thought again. _He must have been about to explode, all that time on the boat with no outlet for all this energy,_ she went on thinking, as she watched his practice. If she hadn’t gotten to slip down to her hidden platform on the back of the squared off boat each night and waterbend the waves following and speeding the Swordfish on for hours, she wouldn’t have stayed with the job for nearly as long as she had. So keeping his identity secret was perhaps not possible, so maybe revealing himself was not truly a gesture worthy of trust, but simply all he could stand -

This line of thought was only going to spiral into more anxiety. She had no time to be anxious just then if she was going to go fishing. If he was going to betray her . . . 

Well, when she closed her eyes and lay on her back in the water, breathing deeply in, breathing long out, relaxing her body from the tips of her toes and fingers all the way to her center, until her entire body was malleable on the waves, the truth was . . . she didn’t _feel_ like he was going to betray her. 

She didn’t _feel_ like he’d been lying when he said any of the nice things he’d said to her, that were so good to hear from a man she wanted to know better. 

She just didn’t feel like he wanted to hurt her.

She could turn out to be wrong. But turning out to be wrong was, given the time they had to wait before they could return to the Earth Kingdom, a way off.

She let that be her conclusion and chose to let her thoughts pass her by. She took the bamboo nose clamp that hung on a cord around her neck and slid it in place. She breathed through her mouth until her heart was not racing anymore. She breathed until her inhale was five counts long, her exhale ten. She breathed until her heart was slow, until not a single muscle was tense, until she was ready for her final inhale.

With her mind finally full of nothing but cool blue, she took her deepest breath, rolled over, and dove.

~~~~

It was as much of a relief to be firebending again as Iroh had expected it would be, when Sana left him on the shore with nothing but the white sand and the open water to occupy himself with. Even basic drills felt like a return to a privilege he’d been denying himself. The pride of billowing bright flame filling the air, extending his will beyond his body to affect the world around him, was a release and a relief.

The lifegiving strength of the sun flowed through him unhindered, and he was blessed to conduct it, blessed to express his will through the beauty and the might of fire.  
He breathed through his forms and felt himself again, freed of the restraints of command and the artifice of his false earth kingdom identity, quieting his ego in the roar of the element that he was blessed to conduct.

He wasn’t done with his basic drills when he noticed Sana swimming fast across the bay, and paused first to see if she were in trouble - but she seemed to simply be swimming like a soldier would run, pouring herself into the exercise as he was pouring himself into his. He ran back through his basics, but when he caught her bobbing in the water and watching, he put on more of a show, jumping into the flashier kicks that looked impressive to nonbenders, even if they weren’t the most practical expressions of firebending for combat. She couldn’t have seen much of it. He wanted to impress her.

She seemed impressed fine when he waved to her and she waved back, bobbing in the water at a distance. He went back into his forms until his breath heaved in and out of his lungs and every part of his body felt illuminated. The energy of his practice filled his body like sunlight filled the sky. He pictured that energy immolating every possibility of human weakness inside him, saw doubt, unhappiness, mourning, all things that were bad to feel fleeing him, like smoke flowed out of wood. 

When he felt alight with the full force of the fire, only strength and purpose and determination and _joy_ remained.

Sana was lying in the water on her back when he looked at her again, briefly disappointed that she wasn’t still watching. Perhaps she was still tired from the night before. But as he watched her float, she turned over suddenly and dove straight down.

He watched the water where she dove, but she didn’t come back up right away . . . or after a while. She stayed vanished beneath the surface. Iroh scanned the bay, looking for her to have come up elsewhere, but she remained out of sight, long after she should have been bursting through the surface for air.

He walked towards the limestone, picking up speed as she didn’t emerge, as he couldn’t spot her on the beach or anywhere in the ocean. What were the odds that a waterbender would drown their first day on the island -?

At least a minute and a half had passed by the time he reached the end of the limestone jutting into the bay. She’d dove so close to the edge where the stone disappeared into the water, and he looked down, seeing a few yellow fish swimming around the coral that vanished into the blue.

There to the left on the seafloor was Sana, her hair floating all about her face, so far down that she must have already been drowned.

He jumped into the water, fighting nausea at the fall and the memory of last night’s struggle when the taste of salt water imposed itself upon him again. His eyes burned as he swooped his arms wide, pulling himself down, down, two full fathoms until his ears hurt so much that he felt something was going to pop inside them. The pain was impossibly sharp, but he struggled for one armful more of depth. His lungs already burned for air.

He burst back up to the surface for air and tried to swim down again, but the pain in his ears was insurmountable. He would never reach Sana’s body this way. He burst up to the surface, thinking - he could tie a rock to their spare rope, and perhaps lasso her body that way -

He was swimming back to the limestone in a rush when a bubble of ice popped up in front of him, a live fish wriggling in the liquid water inside. He looked back to where he’d seen Sana’s drowned body, where a live lobster clam bobbed to the surface, buoyed by solid ice encasing its claws, followed by another fish in an ice bubble.

He dove back underwater in time to see Sana push off from the bottom of the seabed. She kicked her legs together like a sea creature, effortless and smooth, and flowed back to the surface to exhale three minutes worth of air in a loud burst. She bobbed effortlessly, sucking in a loud, deep breath, exhaled fast and inhaled long again. She floated for a while, repeating her breaths.

Iroh splashed over to her with urgency but when she opened her eyes she only smiled at him with mild surprise. 

“I thought you’d had enough of water.” She barely had to move her arms at all to hold herself comfortably at the surface, while he treaded furiously to keep his chin up. She fluttered her eyelashes at him. “You miss kissin’ me that much?”

“I thought you drowned,” he said, in disbelief. 

She burst out laughing, louder than he expected. “You’re so funny,” she giggled, wiping saltwater out of her eyes. 

“You were down there for at least three minutes!” he objected.

She looked disappointed in herself. “Yeah, I’m out of practice.”

Iroh’s disbelief was slow to ebb. She had been so deep, and had been there so long. “Waterbenders breathe underwater?” Did their skulls fill with water, too, sparing them the pain he’d felt when he tried to pass the second fathom?

Sana looked at him as if he were crazy, but the sort of crazy whose feelings she wanted to be gentle with. “No,” she said. “That’s silly.”

“No one can hold their breath that long.”

“I’ve held it a _bit_ longer than that,” she said, still smiling, but her eyebrows were raised at his disbelief.

“How did you get so deep?”

“It’s only about ten fathoms,” she said, as if that were not an impossible number.

“No.” Iroh shook his head. “You couldn’t have been ten fathoms down.”

She was done smiling. “Yes I could. I just did.”

“We’ve sent men to ten fathoms,” Iroh said. “They’re dead now.”

Sana pursed her lips. “Well that’s awful, but if you send ‘em down when they can’t hold their breath good, I’m not surprised they drowned.”

“They didn’t drown. They died at the surface.”

Sana frowned. “Could you explain from the beginning?” she asked, trying to balance sympathy with skepticism.

Iroh, tired of the unfamiliar strain of treading water, splashed back to the limestone and grabbed a fingerhold for support. The rock was sharp, and bit into his skin as he bobbed in the slight waves, but it was better than treading forever. “Fire Sages have sensed undersea vents of incredible heat after years of meditation,” Iroh explained. “My father was one of the engineers on a project to build diving chambers to study them.” His father was, by definition, the head engineer on any of the projects he’d overseen, and there had been so many, but Azulon’s mechanical genius had not been enough to illuminate the mysteries of the depths. “The chamber made it nine fathoms before it sprung a leak. The engineers drew it up quickly and as soon as they opened the doors, the men bled from the eyes and ears. They died within the hour. They were screaming in agony.”

He’d been home when that experiment had taken place. It was the only time he had ever seen his father look stunned by the outcome of any of his actions.

Sana looked appropriately horrified.

“Well that’s awful and I’m sorry for those men,” she said, “but I been down more than 10 fathoms plenty of times and I’m still alive. We can measure a length of rope down to the bottom if you don’t believe me.”

“I will not ask you to do something I already know people have died doing.”

Sana’s frown was pronounced now. “Who’s the expert on diving here? You _really_ think you the Fire Nation knows more about it than me?”

 _What the Fire Nation does not already know is only worth knowing if it can hurt us,_ Iroh thought, and imagined a team of Northern Waterbenders diving under the Gates of Azulon. It had to be impossible, but if it weren’t, he had to know. “How do you endure the pain in your ears?”

Sana held her nose and her cheeks puffed almost imperceptibly, only across her sinuses, without reaching the sides of her face. “You clear ‘em, obviously.”

That meant nothing to him. “A waterbending trick,” he guessed.

“It ain’t waterbending,” Sana said. “You ain’t gotta bend to dive like that.” She paused. “It helps to get past the Door to the Deep, but other than that -”

He clung to the rock and Sana bobbed gently towards him with smooth, unhurried movements. “You’re waterbending right now,” he pointed out.

“I am not,” she said. She’d gone back to smiling bemusedly at him. “I just know how to swim.”

“If I let go of this rock, I’m going to sink like one.”

“Well you are pretty dense.”

He started to get truly angry, but she reached out and ran her hand over his shoulder, down his arm to rest on his bicep. “A lot more than me, I’ll give you that” she said, resting her other hand on his muscular chest, smiling like she wanted to go back to kissing him again.

The caress soothed his pride. “I can’t believe anyone who isn’t a waterbender could dive like that.”

“I’ve got a whole month to prove to you otherwise,” she said, sweeping the ice-caught fish and lobster-clam atop the limestone. Iroh’s stomach growled in anticipation of more substantial food. “Maybe in that amount of time I can even teach you to swim,” she teased.

He frowned. “I know how to swim!”

Sana laughed again, louder and harder than he liked, but kept her hands on his chest, which he did like. “I already knew you were funny, but you’re killing me here.”

~~~~

A/N: Iroh doesn’t know all the engineering that went into the failed diving bell project he describes, so he leaves out the detail that killed the engineers involved. To compensate for the pressure of the water increasing on the diving bell, Azulon’s team filled the diving bell with pressurized air and lowered the device slowly as they monitored for leaks. The increased pressure and long time of descent lead to an extreme case of the bends when the men were removed too rapidly from their pressurized atmosphere. The history of scuba diving and deep sea exploration is full of similar unfortunate deaths. Freedivers, who dive on a single breath, are far less likely to encounter the bends, and can regularly dive to and ascend from depths that require decompression stops if a diver is breathing from a tank. Maybe I should add “occasional horrifying dive science facts” to my list of tags! 


	5. If You've Been Waiting For Falling In Love, You Don't Have to Wait On Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said I’d link a playlist at the end of this story, and picking song lyrics for chapter titles is fun for me for setting tone, but I keep having too many good songs to pick from and some of them are instrumental. ’ll start listing each chapter’s background writing songs in the opening author’s notes. Here’s this chapter’s mini-playlist:
> 
> Moon Rise - Trace Bundy  
> Burn Fast (Koni Remix) - Bryce Fox  
> Sanctuary - Joji  
> Open Waters – Lael
> 
> This chapter’s title is from Sanctuary.

Chapter 5  
If You've Been Waiting For Falling In Love, You Don't Have to Wait On Me

It became clear after sunset why the currents around the island were so unique. A migration was on.

Pale shapes rolled far off in the western water, luminescent even at such a far distance. They swam in such a mass that there couldn’t have been any room between each of the massive bodies, sweeping flukes and fins.

Iroh watched them for a few seconds before looking at Sana to see if she found them noteworthy. She was working tangles out of her hair with her camellia oil and an ice pick, a pair of green coconuts sliced open by her feet. When she caught him looking at her, she only smiled without a word about the incredible sight at the edge of the ocean. He looked back to the glowing, blue-edged white bodies tumbling through the water in a river with no end, and she followed his gaze out to the horizon.

“What are you looking at?”

She’d watched the entire sunset with him on the white sand beach, pointing out her favorite shades of orange-pink in the clouds and deep indigo in the night sky as it advanced, fully attentive to the first stars that appeared. If such mundane beauty captivated her, she couldn’t possibly see the far rarer spirits on the move that he saw. Again, Iroh marveled at what his eyes could see that so many others could not.

“Just watching for the moon to rise,” he lied.

Sana laughed. “You’re looking in the wrong direction. And you’re going to be awake a long time if you’re waiting for the moon at this phase.”

“I should have asked you,” he said. He left the water’s edge and sat beside her, accepting the coconut she offered, kissing the hand that offered it. Sana’s eyes were bright as he kissed her palm, once, twice, and kept her hand in his as he sipped the coconut water, cool with a sphere of ice floating in the center. Sana squeezed his hand before withdrawing hers to finish untangling her hair, and he let out a contented sigh, looking her up and down in the dim evening light, from her untangled hair falling in damp waves over her shoulder, down her long legs to her sandy bare feet. “I could have been looking at something lovelier and more reliable than the moon all this time.”

“Oooh, you’re gonna make the moon spirit mad,” she declared, mouth open in mock-scandal. “I am NOT getting swept off in that tidal wave when she vents her anger. You’d better sleep on the other side of the beach tonight.”

“Please no!” A mosquito landed on Sana’s arm, and he reached out to brush it away. “There’s only one bug net.”

Sana glanced where the mosquito had landed, then spread her arms, left hand palm up at chest height, right hand at eye level, wrist soft and palm down. She brought the fingers of her right hand together suddenly, sharply pointed down, and the air around them cooled like the dead of winter. Frost fell sparkling onto the sand, dead bugs pattering down among the twinkling, fast-melting ice.

“You’re right, that would be cruel and unusual,” she said, sipping her coconut water through an ice straw, while Iroh ran his hand from her shoulder down her arm, where she turned her hand up to accept his again, entwining her fingers with his. The air she’d chilled had raised goosebumps on her dark skin.

“Besides,” he said, stroking her palm with his thumb, “Who’d keep you warm if you were all the way on one side of the beach and I were on the other?”

Sana laughed softly. She leaned in for a kiss, but only gave him one before she stood up. “You know it’ll be hot again in a moment. I’m gonna get my bending in before sleep.”

Iroh had been yawning since sunset, but Sana had done the same at noon, napping in their shelter after they’d eaten their lunch. If she were a night person, well, perhaps that had something to do with why the Northern Waterbenders attacked hardest and oftenest at midnight. Iroh glanced at their shelter, a tarp arrayed in a triangle over a rope drawn between two bamboo stakes, just enough of the tarp bent over the rope to give them a roof while still covering the sand for sleeping, the bug net thrown over the whole thing. He was plenty ready to crawl in and drop into the oblivion of sleep, but even though this chance to watch a waterbender up close and peacefully would be repeated again, he simply wasn’t tired of looking at Sana yet.

She walked to the water’s edge, spread her arms wide and swept her arms backwards, tilting her head back, stretching her neck and ribcage wide. She inhaled, drawing her arms in, bent forward to touch the ground and stretch her legs, then stood up, reached high, and bent into a full backbend, her chest as wide as she could open it.

She stretched a while longer before stepping knee deep in the sea. She stood in a waterbending form, knees bent, feet a little wider than her shoulders. She moved as slow as thick honey dripping from a comb, but the surface of the sea rippled as she bent her knees. She lifted her arms with her hands hanging soft at the wrist, and the rippling surface bulged up, seawater lifting into a bubble that hovered as her arms came level with her shoulders and she finally lifted her hands.

She held the water in place for several breaths before continuing through her forms, and Iroh recognized an incredibly slowed-down version of forms that he’d faced in battle, soft and graceful as Sana took them inch by inch. The water shifted from its perfect sphere to an elongated oval, to a length as long and thin as a whip, the surface smooth and uniform as she maintained her control over it. A bug flew suddenly into her ear and the water rippled and vibrated as her control wavered, but didn’t drop. The mistake only served to demonstrate how much control she maintained in her slow motions, her strength in maintaining _stillness_ over her element, sustaining it through the forms she bent it into for such a long length of time.

Iroh had always wondered how waterbenders didn’t burn their chi out simply holding up the weight of their own element, which was always fluctuating. Fire would go in the direction it was shot, and earth, once bent, kept its shape, but water was always a moment of lapsed concentration from falling back into shapelessness. How waterbenders built the control to keep their element in form seemed to be by this - the slowest possible practice, building the greatest endurance through the longest sustained effort.

Sana bent one knee almost entirely to the ground, dipping into the sea, her right leg out straight. Her bubble of water widened to a shield like a portion of a sphere, and she swept the water shield through its arc to complete that perfect sphere around herself before shifting the bend from her left leg to her right without standing up, the water shield becoming a spear as she stood up with the downturning hand and fingers brought together that had frozen the air around them earlier. She stood again and brought her hands to her center, left over right, palms facing each other, and the ice spear she controlled became a water sphere and flowed between her hands. She shifted right, drawing the water out into a long, slow whip between her hands, then back to center and the sphere with her right hand above her left, then shifted left to repeat the slow whip. She repeated the shift again, and again, the meditative movement soothing and slow, slow, slow, like ice thawing naturally on a morning between winter and spring.

Iroh watched her for a while longer before the length of the day and the poor quality of the sleep he’d already gotten caught up to him. He crawled under the bug net and into sleep, with barely a moment of wakefulness left to watch Sana’s blurred movement through the net.

He startled awake when she crawled under to join him. There was such limited space on the tarp that it didn’t make sense not to put his arm around her.

“Oh, you’re familiar,” Sana teased, when his arm found her waist.

“I said I’d keep you warm,” he said, sleepy, but paused. Perhaps he _was_ overreaching.

But Sana wriggled back under his arm, reaching up to stroke his hand. “I think you better,” she said, a smile in her voice. The air was warm, the sand giving off heat from the sun, but still she said, “I don’t like to be cold.”

Midnight weighed heavy on his eyelids. Iroh drifted off to sleep with his own contented smile, nose buried in his companion’s sea-scented hair.

~~~~

Iroh awoke at dawn, as usual. He’d shifted to his back in sleep, and Sana had rolled to face him, her forehead on his shoulder, her hand resting on his arm, cuddled up to his bicep.

He smiled again as he breathed deeply, reveling again in his luck. There was no reason to hurry out of rest, as at the Leijiang camp, and indeed, a reason not to hurry to leave it, unlike camp. He pressed his nose to Sana’s forehead, kissing her soft skin.

She murmured, wordlessly pleased, as he began to stroke her cheek, rolling to face her and put his arm around her again. She shifted slightly in response to his attention and murmured out - “too early.”

Iroh chuckled into the crown of her dark hair. She _had_ been up later than him. “You’re going to miss the sunrise,” he warned, taking his arm from around her to squeeze her shoulder. “It’s going to be beautiful.”

“I can’t believe it,” Sana groaned, in tones of the utmost despair. “ _You’re a morning person.”_

Iroh laughed. “By all means, sleep in,” he said, rising up on his elbow, kissing her cheek. Why not? He had his morning practice to do. “Breakfast is on me.”

“Can’t question,” Sana murmured, turning over as he exited the shelter. “Too tired.”

Iroh grabbed a mango from the deck of the fastboat for his own breakfast, then ran through his firebending on the beach as the sun rose over the mountain of the island behind him. The humid morning grew from warm to hot, and the air rippled with heat around him as he vented the excess. When his morning routine of practice was done, the sun angling from the east, Sana hadn’t moved in her shelter, so he went picking up mangoes that had fallen overnight to add to their pile. He sorted out the ones that had finished ripening overnight and put them in a pile by the shelter for Sana, when she awoke. He considered the sea, blue and nearly flat calm.

They’d buried the remains from yesterday’s seafood farther up the beach, and Iroh took the fishing tackle from the boat to go and get an entrail for bait. He had never fished before, but it wasn’t as though he had anything more pressing to do with his time while Sana slept. The minutes passed and fish nibbled the bait from his hook without taking it, until, finally, one did - but when it did, the fish was such a delicate arrangement of long fins, striking in orange and white, that Iroh felt completely unwilling to kill it until someone else had gotten a look at it live.

Sana rolled over in the shelter, stretched, and he ran over to pop in under the bug net. She opened her eyes to his face, hovering upside down above her. “Oh good, you’re up.”

She smiled. It was so nice to start the morning with an unreserved smile from someone beautiful and happy to see him. “I am now,” she agreed, yawning. “What you been up to?”

“I caught breakfast, but you should come see it first,” Iroh said, eager to show her the fish. 

Sana yawned again, arching her back in a stretch that was deeply appealing to watch from above. “All right,” she yawned, sitting up and crawling out of the shelter.

He showed her the delicate fish, hooked and floating where he’d tied the fishing line to a rock. 

“I didn’t want to kill it before you woke up,” he said. “Look how elegant it is. It would be a shame to only see it dead.”

He brimmed with pride as Sana looked at him with a smile that was less admiring than he’d hoped.

“I’m real glad you didn’t kill it,” she said. “Those’re poisonous.”

Iroh’s pride deflated. “They are?”

“’Fraid so,” Sana confirmed. She bumped her shoulder into his. “Covered in poison spines. Good job hookin’ it, though. I never seen a lionfish so well caught.”

Iroh sat back on his heels, looking at the caught fish. “Poison spines. That will make getting the hook back hard, won’t it?” he asked.

Sana stood up and dropped into a waterbending stance, sweeping the fish onto the rocks. She froze it in a case of ice, stuck fast on the limestone, then plucked the hook out safely with one hand, and thawed and swept the fish back into the water.

“Will you ever run out of good tricks?” Iroh asked, as the hook gleamed in her hand.

“Not anytime soon,” Sana said, rewinding the fishing line with a toss of her hair.

She plucked a parrotfish quickly out of the water in a bubble, and Iroh followed her to the beach outside the bay, where she cut the fish’s gills and left it bleed out on an ice spike in water too shallow for sharks to reach. Back at the fastboat, she pulled water out of the humid air and froze it into cups. She bent the juice out of the mangoes and into the cups and handed one to Iroh. Parched from his morning practice, he drained the drink, then smiled as Sana, conscientious, half-melted the cup so that it refilled itself in his hand. He hadn’t had time to kiss her hand upon the first offer of a drink, so he caught her hand up and kissed each one of her fingers in thanks. She giggled this time as she let him thank her, blushing under her dark skin all over again. _A much nicer way to begin the morning than receiving the night’s brief from his soldiers._

“So,” Iroh asked, as he sipped his cool drink, “How shall we entertain ourselves today?”

Sana raised her eyebrows over the edge of her cup. “I could teach you to dive.”

He thought of being expected to deny himself breath even a third as long as he’d seen Sana go down the day before and felt starved for air already. He imagined being far enough underwater not to be able to reach the surface for regular breath and repressed a shudder. “Or,” he suggested. “We could explore the cliffs to the south.”

“Really? You feel like getting back on the boat already?” Sana was pleased. Iroh balked. He’d meant to suggest exploring inland.

“I could clear a path through the jungle,” he said. The vegetation was dense, the air humid, but he was confident he could burn a trail. “Not to the other side of the island in one day, but I could start -”

“There’s no need to burn the jungle down,” Sana said. She began braiding her hair tightly. “It will be so much easier and we’ll see so much more by sailing around. It’ll be fun.”

Her enthusiasm was a little contagious. Iroh looked at the sea, flat calm in the bay formed by the north beach and the south cliffs. The memory of that first night’s terrible sail still clung to him like a bad smell, but he couldn’t stay sick at the thought of returning to sea forever. Eventually they’d have to return to it long enough to return to the Earth Kingdom.

“C’mon,” Sana insisted. “We’ll just sail around the bay, maybe out to the south past the cliffs.” She wrapped a fiber from a brown coconut a few times around the end of her braid, dipped it in the sea, then bent all the water out of it, tightening the fiber in place. “I can teach you how to sail the sandeq,” she said. “You ought to know how anyway, just in case something bad happens to me.”

Iroh murmured into his ice cup. “That’s too practical to argue with.”

“You ain’t excited,” Sana observed. She smirked, and touched his shoulder. “I’ll change your mind once we’re out there,” she said, kissing his cheek, leaving him already a little more enthusiastic.

After a breakfast of parrotfish steamed in leaves, seasoned with salt left behind when Sana evaporated seawater in her metal bowl and a squeeze of tangy calamansi juice, they prepped the fastboat for launch. Iroh draped his inner robe and jacket over a treebranch, but Sana pulled her uniform shirt over her bare shoulders, though she left it open and untied over her sarong dress.

“You oughta bring those,” she said, looking at his fair skinned chest. “I ain’t complaining, but you’re about to get a lot of sun.”

“I draw power from the sun,” Iroh insisted. He stretched, certain to flex everything from his navel up, so that she’d agree it was better he stay unclothed. “I’ll be fine.”

She took in the show willingly. “I suppose you know the sun better than I do,” she demurred.

She swept water under the boat while Iroh pushed from shore. She didn’t bother to drop the sail when she jumped on, but knelt and lifted her hands in front of her, building a tall wave behind the boat and letting it break, pushing the boat so fast that Iroh lost his balance and grabbed the mast. The boat flew on the face of the wave as Sana sustained it, fast as a powerboat but silent aside from the breaking water. The wind blew the sweat and heat from Iroh’s shoulders, and he fell into delight at the novelty of the silent speed over the jewel-blue sea. Shadows of reefs raced underneath them as they sped towards the open sea. The sun emerged from behind an overhead cloud, and the surface of the water seared with a million glittering diamonds. Iroh shaded his eyes, arm around the mast as they approached the mouth of the bay. Sana braced her feet, thrust her hands behind herself, and the wave they surfed rose and thrust them out of the bay’s protection, onto the long, slow rolling waves of the open sea.

She was laughing, cheering as if at a victory, as she let the wave down gently behind them. The boat slid down the face of a smooth wave and rose on the next crest as Sana opened her arms wide, breathed in deep, and collapsed to her seat on the deck.

“I told you it would be fun,” she said.

Behind her, the island was a gleaming mountain of black stone and green jungle, the white sand beach an inviting strip, already home away from home. The south facing cliff towered, greenery hanging off the edges, running on for miles and miles of gently crashing waves. More islands dotted the ocean southward, disappearing into blue haze in the far distance, whitewater crashing on shallow, unexposed reefs. The deep water that rolled beneath them, pushing the sandeq north, was the most vivid blue Iroh recalled ever seeing.

A vacation house would be nice, built at the top of that cliff, he thought, looking at the point at the mouth of the bay. A comfortable midpoint between the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom, where a man could occasionally get away from his responsibilities, far enough away that no one would be able to trouble peace, when he chose to seek it -

“I never doubted you for a minute,” he agreed, feeling his smile match Sana’s.

The swelling waves lifted and settled them so gently, compared to the memory of the torturous back and forth of the night they’d sailed for their lives. Iroh already felt a little silly for hanging on to the discomfort of that night long enough to be reluctant to take fastboat around the island. Already the thought of slogging through the jungle, firebending his way out, seemed unpleasantly like labor compared to sailing quietly over the surface of the smooth sea, fast and silent. He stood up to test his balance on the rolling waves, and as he did the surface to his left broke suddenly with vivid scarlet and yellow fins.

Macawphins - smaller and redder than the more common foxphins - swam by, the water around the fastboat suddenly flashing with their vivid scarlet bodies. One broke the surface and soared the length of the fastboat over the surface of the water, huge red pectoral gliding fins flashing with touches of blue and yellow. Dozens of macawphins swam ahead of the fastboat, more leaping in long glides and acrobatic spins further starboard of them. Iroh pointed as Sana yelled in delight, but as soon as Iroh turned to see how she was receiving the visitation, he heard a splash and saw just the tail end of the person who actually knew how to sail the boat diving into the water.

~~~~

The macawphins’ gleaming red hides faded to grey only a few fathoms below the surface, but their blue and yellow flashes remained vibrant even fathoms below. The pod was dozens strong, mothers and calves swimming so close together that their bodies constantly touched, and Sana swept her hands out to swim down, equalizing the pressure in her ears with a flex of her jaw as she bent herself to three fathoms. She held herself in place as the pod assessed her.

A few rolled, showing her bright yellow and white bellies as they looked at her with their huge dark eyes, flowing past her without objecting to her presence. A few passed within two fathoms of her, and she watched them carefully, focusing on their tails as they passed.

The animals didn’t avoid her, or disperse when she moved. Sana surfaced to breathe, confident they’d let her share the water. She inhaled fully and dove again to study their swimming.

They rocketed along with surprisingly small flicks of their tails. It took such wide sweeps of the arms to complete the waterbending move that helped a person dive deeper, displacing water below so that gravity pulled the bender down, but the macawphins sped easily with such conservative movement. Sana gathered energy in her abdomen to mimic their swimming with a two-legged kick that began in her core muscles and rippled all the way down to her ankles.

The energy of waterbending that she generated in her core got lost when she bent her knees, disrupting the flow, and the kick didn’t work. Sana pressed her lips together in frustration - she’d been sure she’d be able to keep her legs relaxed, but not bend her knees, that time.

She couldn’t stay frustrated, though, studying the macawphins. Sharing the water with them was an exercise in joy. They were so much bigger underwater than they seemed from the surface, their dark eyes looking at her too closely for her to believe there wasn’t intelligence clicking away behind their sleek, beaked faces. The clicks and chirps of their language vibrated through her body as she passed under the boat with the pod, swimming fisherfrog-style, wondering if their language could be learned, if they ever got bored in the ocean, or if the bliss of life suited to the endless blue was enough to permanently content one’s soul. They were so sleek and elegant, their gliding wings flattened against the sides of their long bodies, their tails so slender and yet so powerful, driving them through the water with such efficiency. 

If she could arrest the urge in her knees to bend when she mimicked their swimming, without locking them, without having to tense her muscles, perhaps she _would_ have a new waterbending move to take back to the swamp, and no one would question why she’d decided to waste years away from kin in running around a hostile world, when enlightenment was available right in the middle of the swamp for anyone to achieve –

She surfaced to breathe, dove again, braced her core and threw herself into the macawphin kick -

It _almost_ worked, pushing her through the water in an out of control tumble of unfocused power. Again, she’d bent her knees - not as much as before, but just enough to disrupt the flow of energy. The waterbending attempt had used up all her air, and Sana surfaced to suck air down.

She would get it. She _would_ return home with something worth sharing.

She lay face down to watch the macawphins pass underneath and spotted a cave in the side of the cliffs.

It looked about five fathoms down, not hard to reach at all. She bent at the waist to lift her legs overhead, their weight pushing her down, and she pulled her arms in a wide sweep to complete the dive, shifting water from beneath her rapidly above her so that she plunged to depth. She cracked her jaw again to equalize, gazed into the cave and saw –

\- light on the other side. The cave opened to a shore.

She had to see where that light came from! But entering the cave on this unprepared breath would be dangerous. She already felt her lungs convulsing for air, with her heartrate still high from swimming. _And_ she’d left Iroh at the surface, drifting on a boat he couldn’t sail.

Sana rose on her natural buoyancy. She kept perfectly still and relaxed as she rose, her breath lasting longer as she withheld her energy from swimming. She burst to the surface with time to spare.

Iroh was leaning over the side of the boat, looking concerned. He absolutely was not adequately experiencing the joy that this moment deserved.

“There’s a cave down there!” Sana called to him. “I want to go look at it.” She bent the water around her into a twister and rose up on it, landing on the surface of the sandeq. “Let’s anchor,” she said, spinning the boat around in a whirlpool and raising a wave to surf them back to the shallow mouth of the bay. 

“A cave?” Iroh echoed, but he handed her the anchor all the same. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

Sana took the anchor and tapped his lower lip playfully. “So is kissin’ a firebender, and I’m gonna do that again too.”

She took his smile with her when she tossed the anchor and jumped over the side of the boat again. 

When she was sure the anchor had dug deep and that the sandeq was drifting north, away from crashing into the rocks, she swam back along the cliffside until she spotted the cave again.

She rolled on her back to do her breathe up, calming her mind, relaxing every part of her body from her toes to the crown of her head with breath after breath.

She ran through the Diving Song three times, when two would usually do, just to be safe before she finished her tencount breathe-up. Caves were dangerous. But five fathoms wasn’t a terrible depth, even without a diving partner, and Sana felt confident when she rolled over and dove. A powerful current rushed out of the cave, slowing her progress in, but the current only strengthened her resolve to get inside the cave.

She was starting to crave air as she fisherfrog-kicked against the powerful current, timing her kicks with the flow in to the cave for maximum forward glide, and then again with the outdraft for minimum backtracking. She wished she’d run through the diving song a fourth time, but slowly, slowly she crawled through the cave, until finally an inward rush of water sent her soaring inside an open bowl of a reef. Fish flickered in and out of coral in the shaded water. Above her head, the waves knocked against a stone roof, air bubbles running along the pockmarked rock. She pushed herself farther, unimpeded by a current, until the water was clear overhead. She let her buoyancy take her, hands raised overhead in case the ceiling were low. The water was so clear around her that no part of the bowl, at least a hundred by 80 fathoms wide and ten deep, was obscured, the light bright but diffused as if by a great shade. She broke the surface into the cave.

The limestone grotto rose overhead at least another hundred fathoms high, a huge dome broken by a hole at the back top about four fathoms across, bougainvillea vines covered in dark pink blossoms pouring in around the circumference, letting in enough light to illuminate the water, but no direct sun to burn the surface of even the sand at the back of the cave. A single plumeria tree grew in the sand above high tide, covered with white blossoms, filling the air with sweetness, while waves rushed over an outcropping of rock that lifted to the sand bar. 

Sana spun in the shaded sanctuary. Around the edges of the cave mouth, light turned the water as bright blue as lightning. The rush of the water in the grotto filled her ears, regular and sweet and soothing. The air was cool in the shade, flower scented and still. The motion of the sea bobbed her gently without tossing her, no current pulling her into or out of the grotto.

She was speechless with beauty. Already, her heart wanted to make a home beneath the plumeria tree, where she could fill the hole nightly with a roof of ice to block out the mosquitoes and cool the air, in the deep pool where she and Iroh could swim endlessly without her having to worry that he’d get burned and require healing again and again - 

It would be hard to convince Iroh to get there. Perhaps they COULD burn a route up to the hole in the dome through the jungle, maybe collect bougainvillea vines into a rope ladder. It would be easier to get into the grotto against the current if she waterbended Iroh through, and once she mastered the macawphin kick she could get herself in and out with no problem, but Iroh again would need so much convincing to go deep even once she proved she was a good enough waterbender to easily get him in and out.

She _had_ to convince him. The energy of the grotto was pristine, already filling her with an unreal peace and delight. She had to share this with someone, and he’d appreciate it once he saw it – she was certain. He was appreciative of too much for her to doubt it.

The current shot her out of the grotto far easier than it had allowed her entry. She waterbent herself into a twister and rose high above the surface of the sea, spotted the sandeq with its bright yellow pennant stark against the blue ocean, and dropped herself into a dive that sent her angling at the boat. She came down behind the pod of macawphins, and caught another glimpse of their perfectly smooth yet comparatively understated tailstrokes as they disappeared into the blue - she tried the kick again, but once more, lost the energy in keeping her ankle joints too loose.

She swam the rest of the way to the sandeq arm over arm. The macawphins circled the sandeq when she reached it, relaxed and curious, a few of them starting to come closer to her in their curiosity. Iroh was sitting on the deck, contentedly watching the macawphins, as handsome as ever with his long black hair all a mess, a day’s worth of not shaving filling the gaps in between his beard and his sideburns, his broad shoulders starting to go pink in the sun. Sana, overwhelmed with the urge to put her arms around those shoulders again, lifted herself to her elbows on the deck, her feet still in the water. 

She was still so filled with the loveliness of the grotto that she wanted to kiss him immediately, imparting joy without even speaking of it, but she was too much enjoying the feeling of the sea on her skin to leave it. The only thing better than kissing him then would be kissing him in the sea. “Come in!” she called. “The macawphins are relaxed. They won’t mind!”

He hesitated. Sana sighed. One of these days, it would be nice if a man outside the Swamp just accepted that she knew what she was doing when she said she knew she was doing it. She couldn’t be too disappointed, though, could she, when no one had any experience with a woman waterbender outside the swamp. Especially not a firebender who could barely keep his head above the waves, who was supposed to be her enemy, not a friend who trusted her enough to accept the power imbalance of leaping into the sea 

He surprised her by diving in anyway.

“I didn’t think you’d actually do it,” she laughed, as he powered over to her, splashing and inefficient. He grabbed at the surface and plunged his hands down like he could hold on to the air, or like he was trying to mix it equally with the water around him.

“I don’t think they’re relaxed anymore,” Iroh observed, as the macawaphins gave his thrashing a wide berth.

Sana bent at the waist to dive, checking his footwork. She spiraled around him once, paused two fathoms below for a moment to get out her amusement at all the trouble he was having, grateful once again that she’d been born able to enjoy the water with the power she did.

She surfaced and put her hands under his arms, swirling her legs in the interlocked circles that kept her easiest at the surface. She had to waterbend to hold him and herself up. “Calm down. Take the deepest breath you can and hold it for a few seconds. I won’t let you down.”

He was so tense in the water, his usual easy smile absent, his mouth pressed tight shut as if the sea would lift up and force itself into his lungs given the opportunity. Well, he had almost drowned. It hurt her heart to think of someone carrying the nearness of death around next to the thought of the sea. Buoyed up by her hands, though, he did calm down, took the deep breath she asked, and held it.

“Arms out to the side,” she instructed. “Hands wide, back and forth. That works.” She stopped waterbending slowly, relaxing her arms just slightly, until he was bobbing in the waves, chin still above water, even barely, under his own power.

“See?” She said, though her hands were still under his arms. She drew them slightly away. “That’s all you. When you keep your lungs full and move calmly you stay at the surface just fine.”

“That’s fine for a full breath,” he said, in a strained voice, trying to hold his lungs full. He exhaled full, bobbed, and sucked in another huge breath to keep the buoyancy she’d shown him he could have. “But I need to take another pretty often.”

“The calmer your motions, the longer your breath will last.” Sana watched him tread a moment longer, noting his stiffness and the force behind each of his movements. “You’re trying to treat the water like you bend fire, all forceful, but all you’re doing is creating a hole in the water to fall into. Water gets _out of the way_ of force. It lifts you up when you _flow_.”

In demonstration, she swept her hands into a water twister, rising a few feet into the air and falling back, exulting in the full relaxation of knowing that as she fell, the softest sea would catch her.

She flipped over backwards and arched back up to the surface. Iroh had lost his rhythm in treading the water when she splashed him, but before she took pity and bent the water to an ice floe beneath him, he found it again, arms wide and fingers spread to catch the water, inhalation deep.

“Fast learner,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

He still did not have a smile on his face. He chose his words carefully before speaking. “Humbled,” he settled on.

Sana smiled. He’d jumped in, at least. That was a little more than she’d expected this soon after he’d nearly drowned. It was fine. She sent a wave of water over the deck of the sandeq, washing a floatvest over to them. 

“You coulda grabbed one of these,” she reminded him, holding it out. “I wouldn’t have made _too_ much fun of you.”

It was hardly dignified, but Iroh put it on anyway, and once the vest was on, even untied, Sana saw the dawning revelation of what floating with ease in the water felt like crossing his face and she held out her hands. “See?”

“You have a point,” Iroh said, as the rolling, unbreaking surface of the water bobbed them up and down together. The water suddenly flashed with macawphins, swimming around them, their trilling voices filling the water.

“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” Iroh said, with the amount of reverence that Sana was surprised to realize she hadn’t expected.

“Ain’t they a privilege to see?” she agreed.

“One of a few I’m enjoying,” Iroh said, lifting a warm hand to her face.

The world could be so perilous and dreary and uncomfortable, but it was so beautiful and thrilling and comforting in that moment, the island green beside her, the ocean blue and warm and lifting her up like it would never fail her, the grotto a glowing jewel of a memory in her mind. The man touching her skin so handsome and fun, leaping into her element, giving her his trust in her complete control, when he ought not to have even been able to see her as anything but an enemy.

“You thirsty?” she asked.

“I could drink.”

She gave him water, and as he’d been doing since she gave him permission, kissed her hand in thanks, his amber eyes locked on hers. She inhaled deep and slow. It would have been too much just to stare into his eyes this early, but she wanted to - she’d never met anyone with eyes that color before, because of course she hadn’t, when every firebender except the one kissing her hand was out looking for women like her to hunt down, not cuddle with at night -

Back home in the Swamp, if she let any of her night-fire’s cups go empty, she was inconsiderate, as the only waterbender regularly at their fire since Pa died and her sister moved to the south side with her niece. But if she kept them full, she was only doing her duty, and people barely gave thanks when a person was just doing their duty. That was still much better than the first time she’d refilled a man’s cup in the Northern tribe. He’d tried to throw it in her face, too offended at her flaunting her Swamp customs and power he didn't have to care that she’d thoughtfully anticipated his needs. He hadn’t expected her to bend water thrown in her face back into his, but she’d _meant_ for that to offend him.

How did it take a man who was supposed to be her enemy to thank her every time she anticipated his needs with kisses that made her just want more, to anticipate _her_ needs with mangoes beside her pillow, shade when she was in full sun, a caught fish waiting for her when she awoke, even if it wasn’t a fish she could do anything with but let it go -?

Sana flowed into his arms, and he welcomed her in with his gaze still direct, still letting her stare into his eyes without the slightest hint that he thought she was rude for doing it. She couldn’t imagine he’d ever been anxious about anything in his life. It was like her own anxiety just shut up in the face of his lack of it. His arms around her waist were warm against the cool water. His hands landed right on her back where she wanted them.

She leaned in to kiss him, and his lips welcomed hers. The ocean lifted and lowered her in his arms, the cool water washing the heat of his skin away.

He could still turn out to be possessive as the Northern Tribesmen had been. He could still run out of ways to be interesting, as the boys in the Swamp had after too many years of familiarity.

But he wasn’t running out of ways to hold her and kiss her and look at her like she wanted to be held and kissed and looked at. He was leaping all the way out of the safety of dry air and into her realm to do it, and she couldn’t keep her arms closed against that.

They kissed in the ocean until Sana’s dried dark hair burned with the direct sunlight, until kissing in the sea had rendered her so open to the idea of letting his hands wander, that she could only either ask him for _more, too early,_ or stop -

“You know, I still have to teach you to sail,” she said.

Iroh took a breath, at the halted kiss. He let his forehead rest against hers. “What do I get if I’m still a fast learner?”

Sana laughed. “Obviously, more of my free time.” But her laughter faded as she looked at his shoulders, fully pink, and she began swimming back to the sandeq, tugging him by his vest. “You really ought to put something on. You’re going to get badly sunburned,” she warned.

“I told you, firebenders draw power from the sun,” Iroh insisted, taking his floatvest off as Sana reached the boat. “I’ll be fine.”

~~~~

A/N: The grotto Sana finds is based on a real place, and it is the most magical place on the face of the Earth. I would live there if I could.

I tried to make Sana’s interactions with sea creatures respectful and believable. Places where dolphins swim close enough to shore to be swum with tend to get overexploited and too heavily tourist-trafficked, but since this is a fantasy story about someone pushing the limits of ocean magic, I still wanted to include it.


	6. I Could Start Heading Your Way in the Dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This chapter is where the story starts to earn its M-rating, so heads up to be prepared for f-words and some spicy times.
> 
> Mini-playlist for this chapter:  
> Radioactive - Marina and the Diamonds  
> Breathe 2.0 - Vincent
> 
> This chapter’s title is from Breathe 2.0.

Chapter 6   
I Could Start Heading Your Way In The Dark

He got badly sunburned.

Sailing class ended early, when seasickness crept up on Iroh again with a headache that he thought at first was dehydration. By the time Sana had given him enough water that he’d ruled that out, his back and shoulders were so overheated that he couldn’t vent the heat fast enough. Sana reefed the sail and surfed the sandeq back to their beach camp. Iroh stepped onto the sand with relief that didn’t last long, when he realized lying on the sand would only irritate his burned skin worse. 

He stumbled into the shade at the edge of the jungle, unsteady on land after the hours at sea, groaning. His front was almost as badly burned as his back.

“I know you don’t wanna hear me say it,” Sana chided, as she washed the boat a little further inland.

Iroh sat on the sand and groaned at her. “Is this what people who aren’t firebenders feel like all the time? Is this what being too hot is?”

“Ain’t you never been sunburnt before?” Sana asked, still sounding far too amused for the amount of pain he was in.

“You cannot expect me to laugh. A whole orchestra’s playing in my head.”

“Oh, you got your own private music? Wish I had that problem,” Sana said, idly walking to him from the boat.

“You don’t understand. All the musicians have swapped instruments. None of them actually know how to play what they're playing. But they're trying anyway.”

She giggled, handing him a brown coconut shell full of ice and water. “That sounds just awful. I better do something about it.”

“I could use a bed of ice to lie on,” Iroh agreed. “But I might melt right through it.” 

“Just hold still.” Sana knelt beside him and lifted her hands, covered in water. In the shade, her palms seemed to glow. “I’m not very good at this.”

She put her hands on his shoulder, and the cool relief that flooded his skin was so good he could have cried. She dragged her hands slowly down his back and the water was so soothing, when he hadn’t believed it was possible to be soothed that day.

“You are full of good tricks,” he said, closing his eyes in relief as she shifted to his opposite shoulder, then to his burnt chest, leaving a residing coolness where her hands trailed. “I feel healed already.”

“Well you’re not,” Sana said, sounding less than pleased. “You’re still a bit burned.”

“A bit?” Iroh opened his eyes.

Sana lifted her water-covered hands to his temples. “Any little girl from the North would have you fixed up in an instant, but sad to say, you’re stuck with me.”

The searing pain around his eyes followed her fingers as she drew her thumbs from his temples over his cheekbones. The pain of the whole headache concentrated between his eyebrows, while Sana inhaled deeply, her own brows knit in concentration, and all the pain flowed out and vanished through the bridge of his nose. Sana exhaled with effort as Iroh looked at his arm. His skin, red as a boiled lobster-clam a moment ago, was barely pink. He gaped at the restoration. “You call this _poor_ healing?”

Sana smiled, pleased with herself, calm as if she hadn’t just revealed an impossible power, and tapped his nose. “I told you I’d take care of you."

Iroh ran through the information she’d just given him. _Waterbenders could heal._ Even a healer who was _not very good at it_ had almost eliminated pain that would have afflicted him for days. _Any little girl from the North,_ she’d said - women were not trained to waterbend by the Northern Tribe, but did that only extended to combat waterbending? Did the men fight, and the women heal -?

No wonder the northern barbarians were relentless, no wonder their ranks never seemed to shrink unless the waterbenders died on the battlefield where Fire Nation soldiers could see. Their element was everywhere _and_ they could heal themselves.

He had respected the Northern barbarians until that morning. He had not adequately understood their threat until now.

Sana hummed carelessly as she sliced two green coconuts down from a tree. _Information was the currency of war,_ and she seemed unaware she had just given Iroh a fortune.

He still couldn’t think the phrase without hearing it in his mother’s voice. For a moment nostalgia for Ilah’s lessons overwhelmed him. 

He didn’t hide his surprise in time. Sana’s smile dropped as she returned with the coconuts.

“Avatar Roku wrote about that, right? That we heal?” she asked.

If he lied then, she’d know. “If I say yes, will you not feel you’ve given me information?”

She covered her mouth and turned away.

“Well - what was I going to do, just let you suffer?" she asked, more to herself than to him. "I should have - I should have been more insistent. Those burns were too bad to leave unhealed, but you shouldn’t have gotten them in the first place! I should have insisted.”

She stared into space with her hand over her mouth.

Iroh put a hand on her shoulder. “I can’t think of anything that would change our fighting the water tribesmen with that information,” he said, to reassure her. It was a lie. He’d recommend so much more force be allocated to defeating the tribesmen now that he knew of this advantage.

“Can’t you just STOP fighting them?” she asked, even more upset in spite of his consolation. “They ain’t comin’ to your land -”

“Oh, certainly,” he said, gently, “I’ll just pop over to the Fire Lord’s palace and tell him to call off the whole war. He’ll listen to me.”

He could think of a few things he could do to put himself out of his father’s favor and lose even the authority that he had been born entitled to, and that was one of them. It was funny that she'd asked him. It was absurd to think of her asking it of the common soldier she assumed him to be.

Sana covered her whole face again.

“What am I doing?” she asked herself, standing up and walking away from his comfort.

_Aiding destiny in its execution,_ Iroh thought, watching her go. It would be hard for him to convince her of that - she was doubtless attached to her tribe’s barbarian sovereignty, and hadn’t the privilege of knowing the prosperity and culture that life under the Fire Nation - under him, inevitably - would provide her. Ignorance was hard to fight, and people without the luck to have been born under his nation’s flag didn’t know what was good for them until they had it.

He had to tread carefully around her emotions. He stood up to walk after her.

“You’re upset. I’m sorry,” he said, carefully, without apologizing for anything. “For what it’s worth, I’m grateful you decided not to just let me suffer.”

“Don’t tell the rest of the Fire Nation about it,” she said. “Repay me that way.”

“What’s another secret, between a man and the woman who has his life in her hands?” he said. “We already have so many secrets we’re going to have to keep after this month is over.”

He hadn’t made her a single new promise. But she seemed calmed by it anyway, tucking the stray hairs that had freed themselves from her braid behind her ear.

“I couldn’t just let you suffer,” she said, softly, reassuring herself more than him. 

But she stayed on her feet, her arms crossed, her body language turned away from him. She was taking this so much harder than he wished she would.

One day maybe she’d be able to understand what a great thing she was doing for the world and its destiny, by saving his life, giving him information, opening up the Northern Water Tribe to him as an enemy he would, by the end of this month, understand better than any firebender did. She wouldn’t be able to stop herself. She had no idea how many little details added up to a complete enough understanding to sway the tide of one battle or another.

His father might be infuriated if he could have seen Iroh that day, cavorting with an enemy woman in idle passage of time, but his mother would be proud of him. Well - proud of him for leveraging this opportunity to know an enemy better, if not proud of him for keeping pleasurable company with a commoner. Ilah would understand his strategy, and encourage him to pick up every bit of information that Sana dropped in their month together. _You know yourself,_ he could still remember her saying, before he first left for the field. _Your task has become to know your enemy. When you know both of these things, and ensure that your enemies know at best, only themselves - you will never be defeated._

She had been right thus far. It had served him well, throughout his career, to let the right people underestimate him - his power, his influence, his importance. It had served him to know his men well enough to tell which ones could be useful to him with more, or less, information about himself.

“If I had one way to thank you,” he said, trying to move Sana away from the anxiety she’d spiraled herself into, “I’d make you tea.” He thought back to her ditch kit. “It seems to me your survival kit is lacking. You brought all the necessities except tea.”

“Oh I suppose I coulda taken out the soap and made room,” she said, her tone mild again.

“Exactly!” said Iroh, waiting for her to turn back to him, and open up her body language once more. “You could have brought a whole three ounces. We could have made that last, saving it for special occasions only.”

“You’d like me less without soap in a month than without tea,” Sana said. “I’d like you less in a month without soap than a month without tea.” But she did turn back towards him, tucking her stray hair behind her ears once more.

Iroh lifted a handful of fire and demonstrated putting it to his own armpit, to burn away anything that wasn’t his own skin. “You’ve never had tea prepared properly then,” he insisted.

Sana looked alarmed when he first held his own fire to himself, but calmed as she understood what she was seeing. “Well,” she amended, “We can’t all take a firebath on this island.” She cracked a little smile. “I might trust you to tell all your pals I’m dead when we part, but I ain’t trusting you to put a handful of fire that close to me, no offense to your skill.”

“It’s not a technique that a firebender can even use on another firebender,” Iroh explained, dropping the handful of flames. “You can learn not to burn yourself if you’re well trained, but nobody’s invented a technique that lets a firebender hold fire to another person’s skin without burning them yet.”

“So, how you can’t tickle yourself, but you CAN tickle other people?" Sana suggested.

He burst into full laughter. That made her drop her crossed arms, finally, smiling again. “I am never going to explain it any other way. And I like your smell," he insisted.   
He did. It had been so pleasant to sleep with her nearby to smell, instead of the slight mildew scent that often came with camp bedding, and the omnipresent smell of slightly overheated men that accompanied any band of Fire Nation soldiers.

"You say that _now_." Sana sniffed. “You can thank me,” she said, lifting her chin and throwing her shoulders back, “by _listening to me_ when I tell you to do something! I always got a reason,” she said, “even if you don’t believe it.”

“I do now!” Iroh swore, lifting his hands. “I’ve learned my lesson!”

“Then . . .” Sana said, her eyebrows lifting. “There’s something you ought to do, and you’re not going to want to do it, but if you’ve really learned your lesson, you will listen to me.”

She told him about the cave, five fathoms down, and the grotto within. Her eyes shone and her voice raise and fell with excitement as she described the beauty of it - the clearest water, the populous reef, the flowering tree on the shaded sand beach. “We have to go there,” she finished.

“It . . . sounds wonderful,” Iroh admitted, because it did. “But 5 fathoms is much too deep for my ears to handle.” To say nothing of the amount of time he’d need to hold his breath to get through that swim.

“I can teach you to equalize,” Sana assured him. “And I can help you get through. We'll have to practice the waterbending - but it’s not nearly as hard as it seems."

Her expression was so eager, and the grotto sounded so worth seeing. They had ample time to figure it out, and it was something to do in between meals and sailing lessons. “I will honor your expertise with the mind of a student,” Iroh promised.

That made her smile fully again.

Now that he was healed, Iroh was starving. Sana handled the catching of a pair of snapper while Iroh used the boat knife, sanitized by his handful of flame, to prepare a ripe papaya and some mangoes. They steamed the snapper whole with calamansi and salt in a banana leaf. Sana froze the fruit just to the point where it coolly resisted when bit, and all the meal lacked was spice. If only the pepper plants that grew wild on Ember Island had spread this far east, it couldn’t have been improved upon.

“What are you going to do, after this?” Iroh asked Sana, when they’d eaten enough of their fill that the last of the frozen fruit was going slowly for dessert. 

Sana looked at him over her piece of papaya, her expression skeptical.

“Knowing that I won’t tell anyone where you’ve gone,” he added. “Now that the Swordfish is sunk your choice to quit or not must be easier.”

“Well.” She looked thoughtful as she nibbled her papaya. “I’m not sure. Captain Fang and the crew all set aside insurance against the boat, so they’ll be buying a new one. I put some of my wages in on that insurance. She’ll owe me a job if I want it. But I don’t think I do.” She stared into space a bit. “I’d like to visit an air temple.”

A drearier, more difficult journey Iroh could not imagine. Up a remote and freezing mountain for a burnt shell of a lonely ruin? “What for?”

“Bet they had some good ideas about how to take a deeper breath,” Sana said, looking dreamily over the ocean. “I’ve never been able to hold my breath more than seven minutes.” Iroh nearly choked on his mango at this absurd number. “Maybe some airbender secrets would help me increase my time. I could get deeper then for sure.”

“Why would you want to?”

Sana looked at him again. “Hmmm, I don’t think I’ll tell you the whole reason,” she said. “Learnin’ some air temple secrets would make me a better sailor. Could you imagine sailin’ with an airbender? Or bein’ able to bend air AND water? You’d be the greatest sailor in the world. I bet Avatar Roku was a great sailor.”

“He never wrote about it,” Iroh said.

“To know the ocean you gotta know breath and wind good,” Sana went on, musing half to herself now. “I never woulda thought air and water could be so intertwined as they are at sea.” Another crumb of information. Was her tribe not located on a coast? “Seems to me the air temples must have _something_ I can learn that’d make the climb worth it.”

Discussing the entwined nature of air and water at sea, and Avatar Roku the potentially brilliant sailor, had lit another candle of an idea in Iroh’s mind. “If the avatar born to the air nomads died with them, the new avatar would be from a water tribe.” He leaned into her space to look her in the eye. “Are you the avatar?”

He was joking - mostly. If she were the avatar, surely the northern Water Tribe would not have refused to teach her, or suffered her to leave them. She’d have been far too much of an asset. Maybe too much of an asset for them to contain?

But she scoffed with perfect levity, and he already knew she wasn’t a good liar. “Well if I am, I don’t know about it.”

He leaned in, narrowing his eyes at her, but his joking smile revealed his own jest. “That sounds like something the Avatar would say.” 

“I’m not!”

“That _also_ sounds like something the Avatar would say,” he teased.

“Stop!” she exclaimed, pushing him away. “My goodness, I shouldn’t have even brought it up. As if you need more reasons to wanna put me in a cage!”

“I don’t want to put you in a cage,” he objected, perhaps a little too hard. She looked at him with surprise. “I think you’re projecting,” he said. “I’m the one who’s at your mercy here. Perhaps you want to put me in a cage.”

She pursed her lips in wicked thought. “Bet I could do it.”

He chuckled. “You’d have to learn to make a cage out of something that doesn’t melt, first.”

“Oh you think so!” Sana stood up, and shifted into a waterbending stance. “Let’s have our first fight.”

She was simply volunteering to give him valuable information, and he hadn’t had a sparring match since ambling into Turtleray Bay. Iroh popped up and held his hands out in a defenseless stance. “I hope you won’t go easy on me,” he joked, “just because the sun’s going down and you have a whole ocean at your disposal.”

“Trying to make me feel sorry for you already?” Sana said. She lifted her arms, her wrists softly limp, and he heard almost too late the wave coming at him from behind.

Iroh sidestepped to the jungle. The tidal wave came down on the sand where he’d been standing, then enclosed him in a tightening circle of water. Sana, unlike the northern tribesmen, was taking her time. He had a fully leisurely inhale before the water wall was tight enough that he timed and released his fire.

The explosive fire he released from both outstretched hands and his mouth burst the seawater into steam, filling the air with humidity and the smell of boiling salt. Iroh charged through the space his breath of fire had cleared and caught sight of Sana’s surprise before she stepped back and evaded his strike, then his next, her backward, yielding motion drawing him into the temptation to lean forward, off center.

He didn’t fall for the trick, and when he set his foot down on a patch of slick ice he leaned back, instead of committing to the step, lashing out with a kick that would have, against a northern tribesman, set off a direct and focused flame. He held back from actual fire, in case Sana didn’t duck in time. She did, dropping down to step up inside his center of gravity, to grab his foot before he could find his root again. He withdrew too quickly for that, but when he put his foot down, the surf rose up to meet him naturally, and suddenly his ankle was encased in ice. Not enough to hold him in place, especially not with his skin temperature elevated with battle, but enough that he had a temporary anklet when he brought that foot up again in a crescent kick.

Sana met his arc of fire with an arc of water that extinguished the flame and he ducked inside her center now, reaching for her hand to restrain her. He could already tell she wasn’t going easy on him, but by no means was she bending with the intent to hurt him. He wasn’t surprised. He was doing the same. If a little water splashed him it wouldn’t do the damage that any fire touching her would do. He’d never had to pull his punches so carefully in a sparring match, though - every waterbender he’d ever fought before now had been too intent on killing him, and any firebender who couldn’t turn aside someone else’s fire had failed at their basics long ago.

But he was still learning with every move, sparring a waterbender who didn’t want to kill him, who he didn’t want to kill, learning flashier tricks than Northern tribesmen were apt to use as Sana conjured ocean waves into curved iceramps that sent her suddenly sliding out of his reach so fast that he let the fire fly and melted her ramps behind her. She covered her arms and shoulders with water again and he dodged whip after whip, fending off her focused, two-armed strikes with bursts of fire that dispensed more humid vapor into the air. He vented heat as he moved, so overflowing with power in this warm climate that even with the sun beginning to dip flecks of water landing on his skin boiled off immediately. Sana swept more water around herself and her two-armed attack turned into an octopus form, her many whips of water diverting his focus as she targeted his feet and his face. 

He slipped up when his bare foot landed on a broken piece of coral, and Sana caught him with a punch from a water whip to the chest. He stumbled back, and saw Sana’s face red with exertion as she held her hands overhead, performing some move that was so strenuous she’d left herself wholly open to attack. Iroh stepped calmly into place for a flashy kick that would startle her and end the fight -

\- and was surprised when, suddenly, the water was welling up beneath him, Sana’s tremendous effort pulling water through the beach sand and beneath his feet, cooling his skin as it ran upward. It was such a surprise, and so clearly a very strenuous effort on Sana’s part, that he decided to see what came next - the water covered his body, hissing where it cooled his venting heat, and with the downturned motion of Sana’s forward hand, he was encased in ice from the knees down.

“Well!” he started to say, smiling in his surprise, thinking now of the soil composition of the northern Earth Kingdom and wondering whether this was a trick the unique to Sana’s tribe, or if the clay of the northern Earth kingdom were simply too dense for waterbenders to attack through, but Sana tackled him to the sand.

With his feet frozen he began trying to grapple her, but decided again to see what came next. What came next was the water on her arms and shoulders flowing down to his arms, encasing his hands to his forearms in ice that, when he tried to lift them, was firmly held down by what must have been a deep, pronged spike of ice in the sand, the weight of it holding him down.

He funneled heat into his extremities, the thick ice melting slowly. While he was focused, Sana straddled his waist, crossing her arms, looking triumphant as she knelt over him.

“Ha!” she crowed, as the ice melted around his hands and feet, giving him a little more and more range of motion. “Gotcha now!”

In a real battle this was a daunting finishing move to avoid at all costs. In a fake battle, it landed him with an upwards view of a pretty woman who had him nailed down, however briefly, at her mercy. 

He was interested to note he didn't even want to burn way out of her restraints - not just because it was pleasant to have a woman he wanted on top of him, but because with him so restrained, she could do _anything_ to him.

He wanted to find out what sort of _anything_ she wanted to do to him.

“Ah, yes,” he agreed, breaking his hands out of the ice as it steamed away around him - to bring his arms behind his head and lace his fingers there, as he enjoyed his position. “Right where I want to be.”

Sana didn’t blush, and she didn’t laugh, and she didn’t get off him, her chest rising and falling with the exertion of their sparring. Her lips were pursed with interest, as he waited to see what decision she'd come to.

A few breaths in and out to get her air back, and she knelt down to kiss him.

~~~~

This was something to find out, all right - how enticing it was to restrain a man and see him . . . not mind it. Not mind being at her mercy, not mind being in her power.

Sana wondered if he'd let her do that to him again - but she didn’t want to ask just then. Asking meant talking. And waiting. What she wanted to do - what she _did_ do was kiss him, sliding back to press her body against his, feeling him warm and solid and so strong beneath her.

The pleasure of him underneath her was already rising from her center to fill her whole body, as she caressed his mouth with hers, as she fell again into the same warm desire that had consumed her earlier when they’d kissed in the ocean.

He lifted a hand to her face, caressing her gently and pulling her in for a deeper kiss, and the pleasure swallowed her as he shifted beneath her - the ice on his legs was doubtless melted - and bent his knee to rub his thigh along the inside of hers, drawing closer and closer with a slow, deliberate movement to press against her -

She bore down on the welcome pressure of his thigh, a moan escaping her lips as she took his lower lip between hers and held it there with just enough pressure to draw it out - shifting her kiss to the corner of his mouth and caressing his lower lip lightly with the tip of her tongue. He put his hands to her midback and pulled her in, the caress of his hands down to the small of her back releasing tension - she wanted him to touch her from head to toe like that, with his big warm hands and their deliberate, knowing pressure. The requests were forming on her lips.

What did it matter that this was so soon? They only had a month. What reason did she have hold out from fucking him anymore -?

_His people would put you in jail for existing, and he might not try to stop them,_ came the thoughts she’d been relying on to keep herself free, always in her ma’s voice, always followed by the plea her ma had put forward when Sana paid her that first visit to Ma’s new Earth Kingdom home, with Ma’s new Earth Kingdom husband, and confessed she was planning not to go back to the Swamp at all. _Just go home. The world ain’t safe for you, no matter how good a bender you are._

She pulled back from the kiss.

Iroh was understandably surprised as she pulled away from him, breathing fast. “What’s wrong?” 

On the one hand, how could he even ask that, on the other - why would he? Fucking him was no more dangerous than kissing him, and she’d already done that with barely a thought, heightened on the rush of having almost died in the typhoon. He kept promising not to do to her what his nation would. He sure couldn’t do it, when she had all the control over whether he ever got off this island and where he got to once they left it.

“I-it’s too soon,” she settled on, standing up, turning away. Her whole body was trembling with what she wanted crashing up against what the entire rest of the world was. “We’ve - we’ve still got a long time to be alone here -”

“A long time to pass one way or another,” he agreed. She heard him standing up, felt his hand on her shoulder, gentle, heard the concern in his voice. “You’re upset,” he said, when she didn’t look away from the ocean. He must have felt her trembling. “What’s the matter?”

He sounded as genuinely concerned as she could ever want a man to be, seeing her so upset, interrupting a moment that had been barreling towards intimacy.

She looked into his concerned face, still slightly sunburnt, his amber eyes so warm and bright, like the riverwater a few miles out from the spring, where the tannin from the cypress trees turned the water from bluer than sky to a jeweled golden brown.

“I need a moment to myself,” she said. She felt the apologetic smile unbidden on her own face. “I have to think about -”

She couldn’t come up with a quick enough summary of “I have to think about whether or not to fuck you because you’re an enemy no matter how much I don’t want you to be and you may kill people I don’t like but don’t want to see dead and I’ll be responsible for it because I saved your life."

“I have to -” she stepped away from him, gesturing at the ocean. “I have to cool down.” 

He blinked. “I’ll be here when you are,” he said, sounding confused, but not hurt, and not angry.

She got into the sea as fast as she could.

The cool of the water washed away her sweat, but not enough of her tension. She swam arm over arm into the deep blue, diving under just a few fathoms and letting herself bob to the surface.

In the deep blue she finally reached down to relieve herself of her desire. All she could think about with her hands on her breasts and her fingers between her thighs was that he could do this to her, maybe better. All she could think about was his hands on her back, his body beneath hers, his lips on hers, and how all of those things made it so easy for her to find release, even just by her own hand -

She floated in the ocean, relaxed, breathing deeply to restore her heart to calm. It had been too long since she’d given herself pleasure. She’d been too tightly wound up with it to think clearly. Now she’d surely reach a conclusion that let her go back to shore, and -

\- and deal with him laughing at her jokes and kissing her hands and her arms and her lips when she inevitably gave in to her urge to put her arms around his broad shoulders, and let him wrap his strong arms around her and pull her into his lap and -

She hadn’t relieved herself but a moment ago, and already she felt the urge rising to do it all over again.

His people had put waterbenders she’d never met in prison. He’d fought Northern tribesmen. She’d never go back to the North Pole if she could help it, but that didn’t mean she wanted to see any of those men in another nation’s prison, or burned alive, and maybe he’d already burned a few men she’d known alive, _maybe she was an absolute fool never to have asked before now._ Maybe she’d walk away from this and he’d go on and kill someone she’d known in the North, or - or maybe he’d just go on to kill people she’d never met and never would meet and never would know about, and she’d be responsible, wouldn’t she? Because she saved the life of a Fire Nation soldier? Because when she realized that’s what he was, she didn’t take a soldier’s stance in return, and finish what the storm had started.

She wanted to scream. She didn’t want to kill anybody. She hadn’t gone out into the world looking to kill anybody, or be killed, but that was the world she’d floated off into, when she left Ma’s, when Ma had pleaded with her to go back and she'd decided to continue following the river anyway.

_You could have just stayed in the Swamp,_ she thought. _You could have just sat beneath the Tree and waited until you weren’t sick to death of sitting for once in your life. You could have just kept trying to reach the bottom of the Spring. You didn’t have to go downriver. You didn’t have to come here._

_But you did, and now you’re keeping a man alive who’ll kill your kin, and you’re this close to letting him fuck you, because you been alone too long and got yourself alone with him too long and **you ain’t good at thinkin’ about anyone but yourself.**_

Just like they said at her night fire, when she got lost in staring off into the darkness and neglected to fill her half-brother’s friends’ cups again. Just like they said in the North, when she had to ask the same stupid questions over and over in the Healing Hut because the little girls were effortlessly getting it, speeding the lesson on ahead while she was still lost, frustrated over how hard this was, how easy it seemed to be for the literal children she was learning with, how useless that made her and how stupid it made her look to fail to learn because she kept getting lost in wondering if any of this healing that she couldn’t get the hang of could have saved Pa, or if the magnolias were in bloom yet in the Swamp, or how Tei and Idia and Mothmouse, were doing and if they wondered how she was doing too -

It wasn’t an either-or thing. Whether she fucked him or not, he wouldn’t stop going to war against the Northern Tribe and the Earth Kingdom. She wished she could talk to her ma about it. She wished she could talk to _anyone_ about it.

She didn’t have anyone to talk about it with but the man in question, and the only thing talking with him about it would do was go on giving her reasons not to let him into her body, not to enjoy that he was alive, and with her.

She was just resisting accepting what she knew was true. That she shouldn’t be allowing herself to indulge feelings. That she’d been avoiding thinking about the hard things because she wanted something for herself, she wanted something that was good only for her and only for a moment, and because she didn’t want to walk away at the end of the month feeling like the right thing to do would have been the thing she knew she _could not do_ \- take a man’s life.

It didn’t matter whether she’d won their sparring match or not. Whether she was physically capable of it or not - she couldn’t kill him. She couldn’t do that.

If she opened herself up to accepting that he might be kind to her when she was the only means he had to get off the island, but that didn’t mean he’d be kind to the rest of the world, or even to her if she didn’t have leverage over him -

Well, then she could eliminate something she wanted.

Even if she wanted to go on wanting him.

She ran herself through twenty diving breaths before she made herself look back to shore. Iroh wasn’t there when she swam in, and remained in the shallow water that gently washed the beach, but it wasn’t long before he emerged from the lengthening shadows that darkened the jungle, and walked down the beach to join her for what could be nothing but an uncomfortable conversation.

~~~~

A/N: Ilah’s advice to Iroh is paraphrased from a Sun Tzu quote: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” I think it’s fairly accurate for the characterization we see from Iroh in the show, constantly embracing being underestimated and seen as nonthreatening, right before kicking everybody’s ass. I’m threading my headcanons for Fire Lady Ilah throughout this story, which I intend to use to reveal her backstory and fate through her influence on her son.

The breathholding time and diving depth Sana describes as her limits are well under the current records for real life freedivers. The seven-minute breathhold she describes is the longest she can hold her breath lying perfectly still and relaxed in cold water. Submerging the face in cold water automatically increases the length a person can hold their breath by triggering the mammalian dive reflex, which shuttles oxygen-rich blood out of extremities and to the vital organs. Sana’s deepest possible dive, which she lists at 180 feet, probably takes her about 4 minutes to complete and is the maximum time she’s been able to hold her breath while expending the energy needed to swim that far down and back up again. Hashtag goals.


	7. We Can Do What Waves Do

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This chapter’s mini playlist is: 
> 
> SOS (Overboard) - Joseph  
> Start a Fire - Ryan Star  
> Pisces - Xan Griffin
> 
> The chapter’s title is from Pisces.

Chapter 7  
We Can Do What Waves Do

Iroh had to relieve his own tension. There wasn’t much privacy on the island, so his options were to go to the beach to firebend his energy out, or inland to find the privacy he would have gone to his tent for. Even if he truly wanted to do anything but go inland and think about the woman who’d fled from kissing him, she’d departed seeming distressed. If she returned from the sea to him firebending onshore, she might be more unsettled.

That was more than the justification he needed to go inland for the jungle’s privacy.

When he was relaxed again, lying underneath a hibiscus bush heavy with coral pink flowers, he wondered what had upset Sana so much. He was boiling over with wanting to have her, and she seemed to be simmering back at him, but something _had_ put her off.

He wondered if she still thought he’d hurt her. She said she trusted him to lie about killing her, but that also meant she was thinking about him killing her. Evading the Fire Nation had been on her mind for longer than he had, and any other Fire Nation soldier _would_ do their best to imprison her, if they could manage it.

 _Not that I’d let her stay there,_ he surprised himself by thinking. No, that wasn’t surprising. She’d saved his life. She was owed more than an enemy’s dry imprisonment. Maybe she feared he’d betray her to his nation accidentally, the way she was giving secret after secret of her own culture to him. If he told her he was the prince, she’d realize that he alone of anyone but Azulon had the power to ensure that no harm came to her -

He almost burst out laughing at the thought. Revealing his identity was so dangerously out of the question that it amused him even to have thought if it. Yes, that _would_ quiet her concern, if she were worried he couldn’t protect her from imprisonment. No, she would never know - not unless some other Fire Nation soldier _did_ manage to put her in a cage after they parted company.

He would have his informants let him know when new waterbenders were captured, when he returned to the palace. He tried to remember where the jail built to house waterbenders even was. It was in the interior, amidst the arid highlands, but if he’d ever learned the exact location, he’d forgotten it by now.

He returned to the beach, sweat cooling on his skin as the sun dipped low and an evening breeze picked up. She was already there, sitting in the shallow water, her knees drawn to one side and her braid undone. Her sarong clung to her wet skin as it had the whole two days they’d been on the island, leaving so little of her to the imagination, and yet that tantalizing little amount was so invigorating to imagine - he all but shook himself. Her body language was closed off, her legs drawn up and her arms close, her lips unsmiling. Even her position in the water was subtly defensive. She didn’t need to surround herself with her element, but she had, despite adequate dry land to sit on. Whatever bothered her bothered her a lot.

He stepped into the water, offering her power over him as he sat opposite her.

“What happened just now?” he asked. She held his gaze as he sat, direct and blue as the sea beneath a grey sky. “You seemed to be having a good time, and then -” He lifted a hand in question. “Did I do something wrong?”

Sana took a long breath and swallowed. “I have to ask you a few things,” she said. “Will you tell me the truth?”

“I haven’t lied to you yet.”

"Why'd you attack the Southern tribe?" 

She had swung right in with a big question he didn’t expect. But it was easy enough to answer, even if it was a surprise. “I didn’t,” he said. “I’ve never been to the south.”

“But your people did,” she said, “And you work for the one that ordered it.”

“I work for a lieutenant-colonel out of Fort Iruka,” Iroh corrected, distancing himself down the chain of command from the Fire Lord. She was technically right, but he couldn’t risk her knowing that the chain of command was ceremonial at best.

“But he works for someone who works for someone who works for the Fire Lord,” Sana said. “What if he ordered you to kill me, would you?”

“No.” He answered too fast to leave any doubt. It was a true enough answer. No, he wouldn’t, because he’d talk Azulon out of destroying an asset as valuable as a woman with healing powers who liked him enough to use them on him, who’d done the Fire Nation the great service of saving his life, and he’d succeed. It would be the hardest thing he’d ever talked Azulon into, but he could do it. She’d not be flattered to hear herself described as an asset, but that was the only form in which Azulon would consider her life potentially valuable to him, and Azulon saw everything through the lens of what was and was not valuable to him. 

Including, Iroh was wholly aware, his sons. 

Sana looked skeptical. "Ain’t there laws against you about that?" 

"Nobody in my chain of command will ever know about you,” he assured her. “No one will ever know to give the order, even if I would obey it.”

“But you wouldn’t?”

“No.” He’d argue all night about it, and he could win the argument, and that was close enough to be the truth. If he couldn’t, the possibility was too remote to be worth thinking about.

“Are the captured waterbenders still alive?”

Another hard question. The Southerners weren’t even her people - though if she were enough of a traveler to get all the way North, and be disenchanted by it enough to leave, she might hope that the Southerners had more room in their ways for a woman like her. “As far as I know,” he said, truthfully. 

“When are they gonna be set free?”

This was the first question he didn’t have a quick answer for.

“I don’t think anyone’s planning on it,” he said. The tables were turned, and he was giving her information, but so far, nothing he’d said could help the Northern Water Tribe in battle.

“So they’re good as dead,” Sana said. She let out a breath. “Just . . . A real long, slow death.”

He was uncomfortable with this line of thought. The waterbenders in prison would kill him as soon look at him, but she was bound to be softer about them. Putting waterbenders in prison only to keep them there until they died naturally was the choice the Fire Lord had made, and it was, frankly, an inefficient use of resources. The space needed to keep all those people, the high level of training for the guards who had to keep the benders alive without allowing them free access to water, the other work those high-performing guards could be doing . . . what was the alternative? Killing the prisoners outright was a disgraceful solution, but what _could_ be done with powerful enemies who’d harbor nothing but burning hatred after their imprisonment -? It was a problem he’d inherit, once Azulon left him the authority for it to be his problem. _Some inheritance I’m set to receive,_ he reflected. _Other people inherit money, or business. I inherit prisoners._

“I think they’ll be released when the war’s won,” he decided. Maybe he _would_ free them, once the Earth Kingdom was taken and there was no reason for the aged combatants to have any hope of a rebellion.

“But why’d they have to go to prison at all?” Sana asked. “They weren’t attacking you.”

“The Avatar cycle,” Iroh explained. “Fire Lord Azulon wants a Fire Avatar sooner rather than later. The next Water Avatar was supposed to be born in the South, but if they were -”

“They’re in prison now?” Sana supplied.

“Not that I know.”

“Dead?”

“Maybe.”

“I just don’t get how y’all can justify going to someone else’s home and killin’ them and takin’ them hostage all to get yourselves an Avatar,” Sana sighed. “If the next Water Avatar wouldn’t be on your side, why would a Fire Avatar be different? The Avatar keeps the balance.”

 _The Avatar is a person, like any other, and subject to being wrong as any man,_ Iroh thought, thinking of Roku’s blindness to the benefit of the Fire Nation extending its providence to the rest of the world. His noble descendants were still desperately trying to curry favor in the court to regain Azulon’s favor, now that Roku was gone and only his disloyal legacy remained. A Southern Water Avatar would be entirely blind with Southern Water Tribe pride. An Earth Avatar, if they had been born by now, would also be a formidable hurdle for him to overcome - but he could crack that boulder when he came to it. “I can’t speak for the Avatar any more than I can speak for the Fire Lord,” he said, which was true enough.

“But you got men under your command, and you can tell them where to go and fight and who to kill,” she said.

“I can,” he agreed. “And I much prefer my men achieve their goals with as little death on both sides as possible.”

“It’s still a bunch of fighting that ain’t gotta happen,” Sana insisted.

“I’m afraid it does,” Iroh argued. The Earth Kingdom would not accept their destiny as easily as he had accepted his - but who _would_ accept a destiny that was to be the losing side, even if their loss was as certain as his mother’s death had been? “The Fire Lord commands it. I can’t command my men not to go to war, but I can command them to go to war with honor.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that Fire Nation soldiers need to eat, too, and a burned field feeds no one. There are Earth Kingdom captains who will salt a field and starve their soldiers rather than risk Fire Nation soldiers getting use of that field. If I take that field fast enough by outsmarting that captain, he never gets the chance - then his soldiers eat, and his civilians eat, and so do mine, instead of everyone starving. It means executing the soldier who kills a civilian right away, instead of looking the other way and then finding that others of lesser character have followed their example, and now instead of one criminal in my service I have a whole battalion. Do you think the Earth Kingdom doesn’t have soldiers of poor enough quality, that they take advantage of their own citizens? And they have ones in command who are of similar quality.” He thought of some of the cowards who had surrendered to him, whose personal finances were growing wealthy on tithes from the local villages. “Not so in my command,” he said, with pride. “I had to challenge my first commanding officer to a duel over such a crime.”

Sana’s eyes were wide. “A duel?”

“Yes, right at the beginning of my career,” he said. It was distasteful to think of the ways Corporal Jai had abused his command, and his soldiers, _and_ the Earth Kingdom civilians he had had power over, but he was still proud of his handling of that matter. “The man was a vile sadist. He wasn’t limiting his crimes to Earth Kingdom civilians, but to many under his power.” He still regretted not having been able to spare the enlisted Fire Nation men under Corporal Jai’s command his abuse, but he’d acted as fast as he’d seen its consequences. “I challenged him to an Agni Kai - a fire duel - and burnt half his face off. His supporting officers were demoted, and he was jailed for his crimes.” 

At the time, he’d been taking orders under his assumed identity. The corrupt corporal had suffered first the humiliation of a thorough disfiguring in an Agni Kai by a younger man he believed to be merely a 2nd lieutenant of no particularly important family, but his appeal to the Fire Lord to punish that Second Lieutenant had gone worse for him. Jai had been called to present his case to the Fire Lord in person, delivered his case as a scathing criticism of Iroh’s disrespect for the natural hierarchy of his chain of command, and the natural hierarchy of his breeding as a nobly-born warrior of high birthright. The Fire Lord would surely, Jai believed, agree that his blood was pure and noble and worthy of respect beyond what a common young fool from no family he knew to speak of possessed. That same man had to watch in unfolding horror as Azulon had turned to Iroh, who knelt barely containing his laughter, and said “I have heard the Corporal’s position. What do you say in support of your decision to challenge a man of such elevated birthright, _Prince Iroh_?”

Let it never be said that Azulon was without a sense of humor. It was the closest Iroh had ever come to hearing his father snicker.

He would take the man’s expression to his grave as one of his proudest moments, he was sure. Jai’s mouth twisted permanently in a sneer from the twisting burned flesh that marred his right jaw all the way to the back of his neck, as ugly now on the outside as he was within, never to do his worst to an Earth Kingdom girl or an enlisted Fire Nation man again. 

“I received my first promotion from that,” he said. “But that man will never command so much as a room’s attention again.”

“You could just not obey the Fire Lord,” Sana said. “Stop fighting entirely –”

It was the funniest thing she’d said yet. “If I had a death wish, yes,” he agreed, near chuckling. “If I wanted to see men like the one I demoted taking command of my men, yes.”

Sana was silent. She didn’t seem to be finding her questions easily anymore.

“I just don’t see what good it is for the Fire Lord to decide this is what his people gotta do,” she said. She didn’t have an insight into destiny, so of course she didn’t.

“Regardless, he has decided it,” said Iroh. “I can see it done with honor, or I can see it done with dishonor, but I can’t see it undone.” Not unless he conquered Ba Sing Se a lot sooner than was reasonable to expect. “I _have_ chosen to see it done with honor, though, whatever you think of me for it.”

Sana considered him, looked out over the beach at the setting sun, and looked back slowly.

“I’ll be back around sunset,” she said, leaning towards the open water. “I just need to think.”

She turned over in the shallow water and disappeared into the sea faster than Iroh expected. He ran through the debate, trying to see where it could have gone better, or worse. There were far more ways it could have gone worse than better, he decided. He congratulated himself for handling the discussion deftly, and without the laziness of reactive anger. “It’s destiny, and it is right because I’m the one who’s destined to it,” might be true, but won fewer debates with people who were, to their discomfort, destined to surrender.

~~~~

The sun dipped below the horizon while Sana floated, her nose barely above the calm water as she let the salty sea carry her on her natural buoyancy. It was more comforting than anything just to be able to go to the sea when she was thrown this deep into anxiety, to have the full freedom of already being known as a waterbender and able to disappear into the water’s comfort -

\- known by someone who could see past the idea of a whole tribe in prison to follow the man who’d ordered it, on the principle that if he couldn’t stop the war, he might as well fight it nicely.

How could someone mix such consideration to her with a disregard for what his nation would do to her? How could someone whose element was the forceful, explosive breaking-through of fire simply go with commands because he’d already decided the Fire Lord couldn’t be fought?

The night had gone fully dark, and Iroh was asleep in the shelter when Sana came in from her swim. She didn’t want to leave the water yet, and found herself standing in the shallows, looking at the stars on the dark horizon.

 _He’d never even wondered about the waterbenders in prison._ Sana felt, in that thought, the insignificance the Fire Nation had afforded a whole nation it, as far as Ma had learned from the safety of her new husband’s inn, had picked clean of benders. Firebenders this side of the equator had no reason to even think about near a whole tribe on the other side of the world in chains, but she had reason. She could end up alongside them, never to see these stars, stand in this sea again.

 _A firebender who directly defied the Fire Lord would end up the same_ , he’d told her. How critical could she really be of Iroh, for not wanting the same thing she didn’t want? It wasn’t as though she was rebelling against the Fire Lord herself, or getting justice for her southern kin.

 _You’re doing the opposite,_ she reminded herself. _Keeping a fire nation soldier alive. He’ll leave you in the Earth Kingdom and go on to eventually put Earthbenders in prison._

So what was her solution to that? What was her moral choice - kill him?

Sana felt her soul shrink a little at the thought. _I can’t_ and _I don’t want to_ warred in he for first billing as the truth. She didn’t want to kill anyone. She couldn’t imagine being angry enough at anyone to do it.

Her kin in prison could. Maybe she’d be primed for it after a few years in a dry jail herself.

What good would it actually do to kill a man she deeply did not want to see die? One Fire Nation soldier was replaceable by a nation full of others, and - _and you know you won’t do it._ She didn’t even like killing fish, and she had to eat those.

She did what she did whenever whatever she was thinking about wasn’t improving with thought. She began bending. Her forms were a hair fast and sloppy, the water rippling under her control, but after a few minutes of attending to the motions and tuning into the feedback of the water responding to her, she was back in form. Her mind had dipped into the same cool absence of anxiety for the future or regret for the past that she only seemed to achieve in the water.

She closed her eyes as she went through her forms. When she opened them again, the dark water glittered with a silver path. The moon had risen over the mountain, waxing full. It would be full in a few days. It had been so long since all she had to do during a full moon cycle was enjoy the freedom to feel its power.

When she drifted into the Storkturtle Spreads Wings form, turning slowly around, Iroh was by the shelter, awake and contentedly watching her bend. There was no trace of the anxiety she felt over her attraction to him in his flattering, admiring smile.

There was such a feeling of _finally_ whenever she looked at him and saw him watching her like she was skilled and interesting and a delight to have stumbled across. The men in the North had resented her so much for already knowing waterbending and sailing, things they couldn’t convince her to un-learn and un-love. But Iroh was, himself, skilled and interesting and a delight to have stumbled across. It was sure inconvenient that all those things had to come together in a man who was fine with his nation being at war with the whole world.

He stood up and ambled to her side. She kept bending, conveying in her silence that she wasn’t done for the day. He watched her technique for a moment, then said, “The Northmen turn their hands out at the end of that move.”

“Oh?” She looked at him. The northmen had been so cagey about their bending forms once they accepted that she already knew how to waterbend, wasn’t any worse than their average bender, and wasn’t going to magically be as bad at combat applied waterbending as they wanted her to inherently be. And now here was an outsider, who’d seen more of Northern Style combat waterbending than she had, volunteering to show her moves.

He dipped into a form with better flow than she’d expected from a firebender. His movements were still sharper and jerkier than any waterbender would allow themselves to be seen, like the movements were utterly foreign to him - which they were, she accepted, but she recognized immediately the Storkturtle Spreads Wings form with the turned-out hand at the end. It was incredibly attentive of him to have noted the detail. She ran through the form, and the energy of the bending that she had been using to direct the water forward in an ice arrow lifted a protective wave to her right, the redirected energy flowing so naturally that a small quantity of energy produced a great deal of protection.

“Yes, like that,” Iroh said, as she held the water wall in place, then dropped and repeated the move to her opposite side, flowing back and forth, nailing in the new variation on the form. “It’s a pain to get fire past if you’re doing a wide sweep. We try to interfere here -” he reached for her wrist before the slow motion could manifest in the ice arrow the southern tribe used the form for.

She theatrically wound her wrist under his, gently holding his blocking arm and letting him feel how she would use his own motion to pull him along the block and off balance. _What am I doing?_ She wondered again, realizing she was teaching a firebender more about waterbending than he already knew -

“Yes,” he said, as her hand wrapped around his wrist, and he saw the path of her pull. “They do that too.”

Okay. Maybe not. Maybe he was basically already too worldly to be surprised by anything she had to offer that wasn’t tailored for people born in the bodies generally assumed to belong to women.

“Did they teach you any of this, when you were in the north?” Iroh asked, drawing back from her, and clumsily running through a different form - the Repelling Hogmonkey, but his footwork when she imitated it made water geyser in a pillar and rain down in ice daggers in a way that Swamp style didn’t.

“’Course not,” Sana said. There was no harm in saying so. “The men wouldn’t spar with a woman.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “What if they’d _hurt_ me, how would they _live_ with themselves?”

Iroh chuckled. “Not to brag, but I’ve sent more than a few Northern Waterbenders into a retreat,” he bragged. “Imagine if they knew I’d learned my bending from my mother.”

“Oh, they’d sulk for days,” Sana said, a smile playing on her lips. She paused. “Your ma, huh?”

“Mainly. I studied under other masters, but none better than my mother.”

Of course he had other masters, fancy rich man that he was always reminding her that he was. Sana wondered if he expected her to care more that he was rich than that he was handsome and funny and treating her like a master bender worth comparing combat skills with. And it was endearing that he was obviously proud of his ma and her power. “Must have been nice,” she said, wistful. “My ma’s not a bender.”

It would have been wonderful if she had even been an Earthbender, one more thing that they could have shared - but instead it was just about the only thing they couldn’t.

“Your father?”

“Yeah, but he died when I was young,” she said, shrugging it off. “He got to teach me the basics, but he declined real sudden.” 

“I’m sorry,” Iroh said. “My mother died two years ago.”

Sana looked up from her own distant loss in surprise. “Oh, that’s so recent,” she said, sympathy rising. “I’m sorry too.”

His smile was a little sad, as, of course it would be. “Look at us,” he said, still, a joking tone in his voice, as the moon rose overhead. “Quite a sorry pair we make.”

She would never have been able to kill this man, she realized. She looked at the silver path on the water, wondering if that path was a road into the spirit world, or another where she didn’t have to reconcile that men she wanted could come from nations that wanted her in chains.

“So,” he said, now simply following her forms as she bent, his technique slowly smoothing closer and closer to a passable waterbending form as he repeated her motions, defying his own lifelong training. “Am I ever going to hear the story about the catgator in your pants?”

She burst out laughing, the water midair rippling from her surprise. “You were still thinking about that?”

“It wasn’t that long ago I missed out on hearing it the first time,” he pointed out.

Right. It had been less than a week. It felt like it had been months. “Okay - you gotta hear me out in full, but there’s a town in the Earth Kingdom I can’t go back to, because I’m wanted for robbing a dumpling stand with a catgator.”

Laughter burst out of him. “Tell me everything immediately.”

“Well -” Sana pressed her lips together at the absurdity of it. “First of all, I was traveling west on a river, and I found this kittengator all alone - he was so young he came right at me demanding to be rescued, cause they trust anything Momma Catgator or human shaped when they’re that little and starving. I could tell he was orphaned ‘cause I could feel just about every bone in his spine through his fur. So naturally I thought, ‘All right, I guess I got a pet now’ and I named him Duckpossum -”

She’d paddled into a village that night on her old reed boat, and the kittengator had inhaled every tadpole she’d dangled in his reach, but she’d been out of provisions and by morning desperately wanted something besides another catbirdtail root. The first dumpling cart she came across didn’t think much of her offer to wash dishes for breakfast, while the well-clothed Earth Kingdom lady sneered at her leaf hat and her moss shift, but the pants had been an Earth Kingdom gift from Ma, so she could keep her tattooed legs covered “in case raiders ever find the Swamp and you have to run somewhere else.” Duckpossum, full of tadpoles and too much energy in his new Ma’s pants, had been going crazy, scratching her up while she argued with the dumpling cart woman. Finally she pulled him out of her pants, but a little fresh air and sunlight hadn’t been enough to entertain Duckpossum, who she hadn’t expected to leap out of her hands onto the woman -

Kittengators were cute after five weeks, but before that they all looked a little diseased. Duckpossum had been in particularly bad shape with his patchy starvation fur and his bulging eyes and snaggle teeth. He was a handsome orange furred, grey-scaled boy now, but being an orphan had made him look unfortunate. The dumpling cart woman thought he looked worse than unfortunate, as far as Sana could gather as she’d tried to get her increasingly panicked new pet away from the woman who was determined to swat him to the ground, but ended up swatting most of her dumplings without laying a hand on the kittengator.

“It was a big misunderstanding,” she finished. She paused. “That I got a snack out of.”

Iroh was laughing fully. “You ate the dumplings off the ground?” 

“Well no one else was taking them!” Sana objected, glad at least that he was laughing like it was funny, and not like she was a rustic bumpkin with no taste. She had never craved anything that wasn’t an unseasoned minnow or catbird tail root more than she had that morning. “Anyway it turns out that dumpling cart lady was the mayor’s auntie, so I can’t go back to that village again.”

“Some luck you had,” Iroh chuckled. “And the catgator was all right?”

“He stays with a friend while I sail. They like having him in their ornamental pond. Keeps the roachmice out.”

“At least you got something to eat,” Iroh chuckled, circling back to the ground dumplings. “I hope those roads were clean, at least.”

“What, it shoulda gone to waste?” Sana objected. In a second he was probably going to remind her he was rich again, and had never been hungry enough to grab breakfast off the ground. “There weren’t no nice pretty lady servin’ up a nice seasoned parrotfish with a side of tropical fruit to _me_ when _I_ started wanderin’!”

“Why _did_ you wander?” Iroh asked. Sana thought a moment. She figured she could answer that question safely enough, but - but it was late, and she was tired, and getting into all the reasons she’d decided she just couldn’t put up with another night-fire with her half-brother and his friends still made her feel like a bad sister, which was unfair, because if her brother had ever wondered if he was even an _okay_ brother, Sana didn’t know about it.

“Maybe tomorrow let’s talk about it,” she said. She’d already thought so hard about so much that was difficult that day. “I’m tired.”

“That’s fair.” Iroh still watched her bending, following up as she returned the water to the sea. Sana hesitated, no more waterbending and no more energy to swim to distract her from the question of whether she was going to sleep curled up with a Fire Nation soldier again, now that she’d had another whole day to think about it.

~~~~

Sana returned her bending water to the ocean without adding a new ripple to the sea. She didn’t move from the waves. She’d been warming back up to him all afternoon, but Iroh still saw her hesitance.

He put his hand on her shoulder. She conceded, turning to look at him.

“The war will happen, whether I am in it or not,” he said, softly. He couldn’t fault her overmuch. His father had thoroughly brought her southern kin to their knees. And while it would have been wise of her and her hidden kin to take note from Azulon’s decimation of the south and pledge their loyalty to the stronger nation, pride - even the pride of a peasant woman who couldn’t afford to let food that fell on the ground go uneaten - so rarely conceded to logic. “It’s my duty to conduct my part in it with honor.” he said. “I can’t affect the war by leaving it.”

“What makes you think you can change it?” she asked. “No offense, but you’re one person, and the war’s everywhere.”

 _I’m the only person who can change it,_ he thought. “I don’t know all I can change, but I can’t change anything by leaving my position.” Abandoning his throne to his father, to conduct without the perspective of his son’s eyes in the field? Abandoning his throne to be inherited by his little brother, whose only personality at age two seemed to consist of finding the worst person in the room to kick in the shins, and always throwing a louder tantrum than the one he’d thrown before? Iroh nearly chuckled. Even if he were not this world’s destined ruler, even if he weren’t eventually welcomed wherever he went, no one could find any good in leaving the world to those two. “It’d be filled so fast, I’d barely be missed. And probably not by someone more honorable than me.”

Sana looked over the water, away from him.

She’d never accept the gift that was the Fire Nation’s rule until she realized for herself that it would mean not having to eat stolen dumplings out of the dirt and laugh about it as if it were a funny misunderstanding later. He touched her shoulder lightly, and she looked back to him again. “I know that keeping you a secret isn’t really repayment for all you’re doing for me here. You’re saving my life every moment of every day. That’s going to be hard to repay.”

She waited, as if to hear how he planned to do it.

He cleared his throat. “What I mean to say is, I, ah. Could use a drink.”

“Oh.” Her eyes widened. She pulled water out of the air, drawn back in by practical need. “Right. I guess I could too.”

Iroh waited patiently, though she held her hand out with a bubble of water at her fingertips, for her to finish drinking her own fill with her other hand before he took her hand and drank his fill, then, as usual, kissed her palm again, eyes on hers.

She still blushed and smiled as he did, and he parted the kiss from her palm to kiss the heel of her hand, then her wrist. Her smile was firmly back in place by the time he was done, as she looked to the sand and tucked her hair behind her ears and kept her hand in his.

“I keep waitin’ for you to get anxious about bein’ shipwrecked,” she admitted. “Or . . . About anything, I guess.”

“Anxious? Here?” he echoed. A chuckle entered his voice. “Of course, because it’s such a trial to be in the middle of nowhere with no demands on my time - a beautiful woman kindly attending to my every need -”

"I just figured, men like you -”

“Men like me?” he repeated, already intrigued to hear what sort of common man she had to compare him to. “What kind of man am I like?”

“Fightin’ types,” she supplied.

“You’re a fighting type of woman.”

“No,” she put her hands on her hips, looking proud. “I’m an exploring type.” 

“I stand corrected. Tell me about the fighting type of man.”

She had drifted slightly closer to him, tethered by his hand, warmed by the promise of kisses on her skin.

“Fightin men, hunters –” she sighed. “They don’t like to say they’re being taken care of. They like to say they _take care._ But if a woman prepares the meat they bring home and adds food _she_ found to it, _and_ gets the water, _and_ keeps camp - they don’t like to admit that’s them being taken care of. They act like it’s the least we can do.” She paused. “And also the only thing we _should_ do.”

“Was that what they told you in the North?” he asked, thinking of the growing corps of female soldiers who were enhancing the Fire Nation’s army back home. Ilah had been a powerful, skilled, unusual, exceptional woman in the field before duty to her Fire Lord had brought her back home - but she wasn’t the only exception. And the women posted to the home guard were far from doing the least they could. No Fire Nation man would disrespect them by implying it, at least, not where ears as honorable as his could hear. “That you owed them wifely duties because they would hunt and fight for you, while they refused to teach you to hunt and fight for yourself?”

“It wasn’t like that at home,” she said, rising to her home tribe’s defense. “But in the North – the men I was around would get so mad after days without a successful hunt, and they’d get madder and madder at themselves the longer they went just eatin’ what their wives had stored. They never thanked their wives when the hunts were bad. They just expected thanks when the hunts were good.” Her blush came back. “But you thank me all the time, and you never get mad when things don’t go your way.”

He slipped his hand to her waist, confident he’d be received

“It’s the farthest thing from a chore to kiss you,” he said, feeling humor creep into his voice. “If another man sees every opportunity to thank you kindly and didn’t take it, that’s his loss, but it won’t be mine.”

She giggled, her walls fallen again.

Iroh settled his hand on her hip. “And do you like it?” he asked. “When I thank you?”

She smiled. “You even gotta ask?”

“Maybe I just like to hear a woman say it when she likes what I’ve got to give her,” he pointed out. “I might not be born to provide as easily in this environment as you are -” Fire was the superior element to hold in one’s heart, but water clearly had its uses to be held by an ally. “But I can think of a few things I could do to thank you that begin with kissing.”  
The last of her walls crumbled. She stepped a little closer, put her arms around his shoulders, and let him rest both his hands on her hips. “You got a compelling argument,” she agreed.

“I’ll make any argument I can to keep from being left lonely under the net tonight,” he said, “You’re too nice to wake up next to.”

He didn’t have to exaggerate to flatter her. He was so used to being taken care of because of who he was. Whether that meant his birthright, or his rank, there was usually someone from the Fire Nation stepping up to serve him because it was expected, before it was because they liked him. And they were soliciting from him, too, protection as a soldier, as a prince, the providence of what he conquered, the possibility of his father’s favor -

She needed his protection from the Fire Nation, but she didn’t know he could give it. She had no interest in his social status. She simply liked him enough to heal him, provide for him, and then praise him for the absolute non-chore of letting her know he wanted to do more than kiss her.

She leaned in under the moonlight to kiss him some more. She’d run from her tribe, and then from another, across the whole of the Earth Kingdom and found her way to his pleasant company. If that was all it took to put him a cut above the men of the Water Tribe and the Earth Kingdom, in time, she’d surely understand what the other nations were too proud and defiant to accept - that the world was his to rule, whether other men agreed or not.

~~~~

In the shelter, Iroh awoke suddenly.

He was as immediately awake as if it were the height of noon, but the dark still pressed in against his sight. Sana was perfectly relaxed with her forehead against his shoulder, her hand lightly warm on his bicep. No sound had alarmed her.

Yet something was wrong. He always awoke like this when something was wrong.

He tilted his right hand up to produce a light and saw the leopardcrab bent over Sana, its claws the size of an oar open and reaching for her leg.

He kicked flames at the cat and felt its shred his leg instead, lashing with its front paw instead of its crushing claws. He shouted as Sana screamed, bolting upright beside him as he charged the cat, his clawed leg wet with blood, the air full of the smell of smoking crabshell and fur. The shelter came down upon Iroh as he shoved Sana back, and he batted the tarp away and jumped to his feet, the pain from his shredded leg still dim with adrenaline but suddenly powerless to support his weight when he even thought about leaning on it.

The moon illuminated the cat. Fully ten feet from snout to tail, it long antenna sweeping with agitation, its black eyes glittered like lumps of unliving glass. Its armored head and shoulders had shrugged off Iroh’s fire, though a patch of its yellow and black spotted fur smoldered, and its hissing was half a chitter that raised the hair on the back of his neck. The moonlight gleamed off its bared, yellowed fangs, and on the sharp edges of its crushing claws, and the huge paws that dug their own two-inch, slashing black claws into the sand. 

“What is that?!” Sana screamed, sounding as panicked as he’d felt when he’d been drowning. He was surprised she had to ask, but not that she was terrified. Leopardcrabs were upsetting animals to look at, and more upsetting to be ambushed by at night.

Iroh struck the cat with a jet of fire. It dodged, nimble as it evaded his attack, rippling with muscle and screaming like a possessed woman, but as a barrage of water joined Iroh’s fire, the cat ran for the jungle and crashed into the dark bush. The smell of burned crab and fur was noxious as the pain caught up to him.

He managed not to faint, bending slowly to the sand as he clenched his teeth. “Coconut cat,” he hissed, willing himself not to allow the pain to become a thing to focus on. “I didn’t know there were any this far east -”

“Where are you -” Sana didn’t finish asking where he was hurt as she skidded to his side and saw the blood pouring from his mangled calf. She let out a little sound of nausea, but sucked in a deep breath, then another. “I-I have to sanitize that before I close the wound,” she said, drawing pure water out of the air. “I go to the boat and get the alcohol,” she said, running the pure, clean water over the wound.

Iroh grabbed her arm. “No,” he said, through gritted teeth. “I can heat it to purity.” He inhaled, his fingers still tight on her arm. “Stay - in case it comes back -”

She took his hand and let him grip her hard as he breathed _in_ through the pain and _out_ through the pain, wrenching his focus onto the heat that the breath built within him.

Water steamed off the surface of his skin, spilled blood boiling as he heated the wound from within, glad that his mother had never allowed any court physician to attend his own childhood scrapes and cuts until he had sanitized them himself, preparing him for moments in the field, just like this, when he’d have to undergo the immense pain not just of injury, but of sanitizing his own wounds.

Eventually, head reeling, he lay back on the sand, his strength utterly sapped. “All right,” he said, giving Sana the go-ahead. She pulled more water out of the air, spun it in a tiny wheel like the massive one she’d tried to trap him in earlier, the flow pulling cooked blood from his skin. The pain, while great, was at least merely constant, so that Iroh could breathe through it without surprises. Sana tossed the bloodied water over her shoulder, into the ocean, and pulled more fresh water out of the humid air, to coat her palms, glowing in the moonlight.

She laid her hands on his leg and finally the touch was soothing. He felt the skin knit together in a way that should have been painful, but was merely neutral as the damage healed at an accelerated rate. “Thank you,” he breathed, feeling the sweat on his face cooling, the aches and tension rising as his adrenaline receded. “Good at it or not, you’re -”

“Don’t talk,” Sana cut in. “Can’t focus.”

He could see the concentration knitted into her features and her deep breathing. Perhaps a “skilled” healer would manage damage like this without breaking a sweat and while holding a conversation, but what she was doing was still far better than the months of healing that would have been ahead of him in a Fire Nation camp.

When she drew her hands away from his leg, the dull ache resumed, but her hands were shaking from exertion. Iroh sat up to view the result - angrily scabbed scratches that itched, but were still better than days of agony and the possibility of infection resetting.

Sana looked drained. He put his arms around her. She went willingly into his comfort, returning his embrace, and he found he was desperate for that comfort from her too, relived to be able to sink from the panic of pain and battle into an embrace from someone who promised him relief from pain.

Safety. Relief from pain. What a novelty, for a son of the Fire Nation, where danger and pain were certainties to meet head-on, where safety and relief were earned by the promise of delivering more danger and pain than challenging you was worth.

He let his forehead rest on Sana’s shoulder, comforted in the softness of her skin and the smell of the sea that clung to her hair.

“I’ve never seen one of those before,” Sana said, sounding dazed. “I’m sorry - if I’d known I would have set up camp in a safer -”

“If anyone’s responsible, I am,” he assured her. “I have seen those before. They’re almost all hunted out on Ember Island but they turn up every once in a while -”

“It’s still alive,” Sana pointed out.

It was. “We should . . . probably sleep on the boat tonight,” Iroh suggested.

“We should,” Sana agreed.

Another moment passed.

“We have to stop hugging in order to get on the boat,” Iroh realized.

“We do.”

~~~~

Sana dropped anchor in the sloping sand off the beach, then surfed the boat gently to the middle of the bay to check that the anchor had taken. She let out enough line to keep it slack in the water.

“We should stay up a little longer, to see how the boat drifts,” she said, making the line fast around one of the sandeq’s cleats. “How’s your leg?”

“Aching,” Iroh said. “Less than it would if you weren’t here, though.”

“Let me take another look at it,” she said, pulling more water to her hands.

“You know, even not very good at it, this is still months of pain you’ve already spared me,” Iroh said, before she got to work.

She looked up to half-smile at him in the moonlight. “How many times I gotta say it?” she asked, light in tone for the first time since the cat had woken them up. “I’m gonna take good care of you.”

That promise was a little breeze fanning the ember of his affection. When she drew her hands away from his leg, the ache that lingered was diminished. He ran his fingers over the wounds and found them raised and scarred, the flesh irritated, but closed against infection. She lifted her hands to his temples again, and the soothing energy of her healing as she pulled her hands down his neck, to his shoulders, released tension he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying.

He put his hand on her cheek, caught her gaze in the moonlight, drawing his thumb over her cheekbone.

He leaned in to kiss her, and she leaned in to be kissed. He ran his hand down to her shoulder, felt her own tension there.

“If only I could do the same for you,” he said, smiling against her lips as his fingers pressed into her tense muscles. “Oh, wait.”

He put both his hands on her neck, found the tension that began on either side of her spine, and put pressure there as she sighed at the touch. He swept his hands down her neck, pressing down on her shoulders, trailing his fingers down her chest to her sarong tied across her chest.

“That’s good thanks,” she said, tension leaving her under his warm touch, her lips slightly parted each time his fingers brushed the hem of her sarong.

He leaned in to kiss her parted lips. Her kiss grew deeper, her voice a soft moan as he dug his fingers into her tense shoulders, wrapped his arms around her to pull tension all the way from her shoulders down to the small of her back.

“Oh,” she sighed, arching under his fingers, pressing her body against him. He took his kiss from her lips down her neck, and she stayed there, tilting her neck, exposing more to be kissed. “That’s - that’s good.”

“You’ve been nothing but kind to me.” His hands at the small of her back drifted, one to her shoulder again, the other to her hip. Her thigh was soft beneath his hand.

“You ain’t making it hard to be kind,” she said, a little laughter in her voice.

He pressed his fingers into the softness of her thigh, thumb landing in the crease where her thigh met her belly. “I want to thank you _more._ ” 

She met his gaze in the moonlight, leaning into his touch, holding his gaze.

Her hand went to the knot holding her sarong in place around her chest. “Okay,” she agreed. She untied the knot.

She leaned into his kiss again as he drew the sarong away from her body. Her whisper was breathless. “ _Please._ ”

~~~~

A/n: Sana is, unfortunately for her, not a great debater, or her debate with Iroh might have been a little more productive. Iroh, meanwhile, is thoroughly entrenched in the cognitive dissonance needed to wage a war on a continent that didn’t start it, against people he doesn’t hate, based on a vision and his own sense of exceptionalism, and is used to having to debate Azulon for what he wants.

He touches on but fails to adequately explore the idea that while dishonorable behavior within the army might occasionally happen where he can see, there is - and will always be - _so_ much in a military environment that the officers and even higher ranking enlisted who are responsible for setting standards of behavior don’t know about and will never see. Obviously he firmly believes that dishonorable behavior within the Fire Nation is an anomaly that he has to go undercover to witness, but dishonor is so much closer to the surface and more frequent than idealistic but uncritical leaders like Iroh are willing to assume here. He’ll figure it out . . . mostly too late, as he figures out most of the ways the Fire Nation fails to live up to the images he currently thinks it’s so great for.

The coconut cat is a combination of a leopard and a coconut crab. I don’t suggest googling coconut crabs if you have any kind of large bug or spider phobia, not because coconut crabs are either of those things, but because they are VERY LARGE crabs and they aren’t comforting animals to look at. They can crack coconuts open with their claws, and combined with a leopard, one of the most terrifying ambush predators, they would scare the absolute hell out of me just to share a world with, let alone an island.


	8. In Your Holy Water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s been a while! Several work deadlines cropped up in the same timeframe, and this chapter ended up having a lot more in it than I thought it would at first, so I ended up splitting it into two. The upside is that the next chapter is guaranteed to go up in much less time than it took to churn out this one. I hope you enjoy it! This chapter’s title is from Holy Water, by Galantis.

Chapter 8  
In Your Holy Water

The deck was not the most comfortable place to sleep, but exhaustion made any surface softer. The rocking of the gentle waves had its own soothing effect - and then there was the special relaxation that followed when two people who’d wanted each other for enough time gave in to satisfaction.

Iroh had already been growing accustomed to waking up with Sana cuddled up to him in some way, but that sunrise his arm was asleep beneath her head. It was worth it for the press of her body against his, and the curve of her waist beneath his free hand. He checked, quickly, that the anchor hadn’t come loose overnight. There was the island, evergreen dark against the pink of the morning sky. It would be a while before the sun rose over the mountain and threatened to burn them.

Iroh resisted the urge to reposition and smiled at his good fortune, alive still after one crisis after another, still in a beautiful place, still with a beautiful woman ever more pleasant to keep company with. He couldn’t ignore the increasingly urgent tingling numbness in his left hand forever, though. He slid his hand that still had feeling down the smooth curve of Sana’s back, and she stirred at the touch, but cuddled in closer against his chest rather than lifting her weight.

“I know this isn’t your favorite time of day,” Iroh said, feeling more than hearing Sana’s soft giggle as she spread her hand over his chest, “but my arm’s numb.”

“Oh,” she exhaled, sleepily rising up over him, transferring herself to his other side. He shook out his left arm, holding his right out to receive her, as she snuggled up to his chest again, inhaling with deep contentment, yet more awake than she’d been before at this hour as she met his gaze with a smile of pure delight.

“Are you good at _everything_ you do?” he asked, and she buried her face in his chest to cover her blushing laughter. “Besides healing.”

“I’ll take a look at your scars later,” she promised, her voice still sleepy, her lips brushing his skin in a good-morning kiss. “Gimme enough time I’m sure I can fix them up.”

“The scars can stay,” Iroh said, shaking his left arm again to continue reviving it. “Soldiers collect scars. They’ll be conversation starters in time.”

She lifted her face from his neck, her blush a pleasant warmth beneath her skin. “You were good too,” she said. She’d reassured him of as much already the night before - but he liked the excess praise. “In case I didn’t make it clear already -”

“I’m not tired of hearing it.”

She traced her fingers across his collarbone, her early-morning smile silent and already yearning. She slid up to kiss his lips, spreading her hands across his chest.

A repeat of the night before, as good as that would be, couldn’t happen yet. “Much as I’d like to go again,” Iroh said, drawing away from her lips, “I haven’t prepared.” Male firebenders were fortunate enough to have the option of raising their own body temperature enough to render themselves temporarily unburdened by fertility. Irresponsible or unskilled benders had been known to neglect it, but he’d been using the technique every dawn and every evening he’d been on the island and trying to get Sana into the position she was now. “There’s a technique firebending men use to ensure they won’t get a woman pregnant. I haven’t done it recently enough.”

“What a coincidence,” Sana said, still trailing her fingers across his chest. “I got my own technique.” She didn’t elaborate. To be fair, neither had he. “I wasn’t gonna have your babies even if you tried.”

“I wasn’t ever going to give you the chance. I’m not irresponsible. I intend to know my children.”

“Aw.” She seemed touched. “I did wonder if you were going to care. A lotta men don’t bother to think about it.”

A lot of men’s hypothetical children didn’t stand to inherit the honor AND the responsibility of ruling the world. There were so many reasons for him to care deeply about knowing that only his eventual wife gave him his sons and daughters, legal and political - but mostly he had considered the idea of a child of his growing up without knowing who they came from, lacking the deep rooted assurance of knowing your ancestors down to the first to bear family’s name and the strength and power that came from that.

“All the same,” Sana went on, “I ain’t shirkin’ my technique just because you’ve got your own. I want babies, but not with a man who’s gonna run back north to keep fightin’ other men who apparently can’t get enough of the cold.”

“All the same . . . same,” Iroh said, chuckling.

“So . . .” Sana said, cuddling up next to him anyway, still naked and appealing in the daylight. “That don’t rule out _everything_ , though, do it?” 

It didn’t.

~~~~

A handful of satisfying moments later, Sana surfed the sandeq back to shore, conjured a raincloud to refresh under, and they attacked their earlier-collected mangoes and papayas with the ravenous appetites of too much fighting, healing, and other nighttime activity.

“We should see to the coconut cat, if we can find it,” Iroh said, a trace of grimness sneaking into his voice as he finished a second papaya, his stomach still growling. “It was likely already injured before it tried to eat us, and if it’s not dead already, we’d be putting it out of its misery.”

“Oh,” said Sana, with a slow tone of realization. “I see.”

“They’re good to eat,” Iroh said, trying to cheer her up about the prospect of a hunt. Surely she was no less hungry than he was. “The claw meat is sweet, from all the coconuts they eat.”

“There’s some irony for it,” Sana said, accepting the hunt.

Iroh was not the greatest hunter, given that the army trained rangers in that art of provisioning, but he’d learned how as a matter of practicality. The coconut cat, possibly in its death throes, hadn’t done much to cover its tracks either, and Sana let him take the lead. However well she’d been trained to hunt, she clearly had not mastered it like she’d mastered fishing. Iroh made a note to set a few snares with the entrails of their fish, so that she wasn’t burdened with all the provisioning.

The coconut cat was, as Iroh had expected, close to death. The cat’s rear paw was swollen with infection from boarcupine quills so deeply embedded that they barely extended from the wound, which had been festering for months beforehand.

“If you’ll restrain it, I’ll end its misery,” he offered, seeing Sana hanging back from the pained creature.

She handed him the boat knife and held her hands straight out to either side, the humidity in the air misting around her in a dome as she conjured enough water out of the air to restrain the predator.

There wouldn’t be enough - but suddenly the plants around the cat wilted and shriveled into dust as Sana sucked the water out of them. She cuffed the cat’s paws and its huge, snapping claws with ice. Its deep growl rose in pitch, shaking Iroh’s heart and touching on the terror that had filled every bone in his body when he’d faced the Masters on the island of the Sun Warriors only a few years before. 

Even the intimidating growl of a coconut cat was easy to shake off when he had the voices of dragons forever in his memories. “You did make a worthy opponent of yourself,” he granted the immobilized cat, as he found the right space between vertebrae to position the knifeblade. “I hope your passing is easier than your night was.”

He put the full force of his strike behind the knife. The cat’s growl cut out instantly. It had been as kindly done as death could be.

“I appreciate you taking care of that,” Sana confessed, tucking a tangle of hair behind her ear. “I don’t even like killing fish.”

She was surprisingly gentle to have made it as far from her sheltered tribe as she had. That gentleness was to his benefit, and he was too well schooled in the times and places to be hard and deadly to need anyone else to do it for him. “Even when something has to die, it’s better that their suffering be minimal. I can kill the fish from here on in if you want.”

They cut the cat’s claws to take back to the beach. Together they polished off an entire claw, doing away with the hunger of the night.

“There could be others in the jungle,” Sana said, looking over the bay.

“They tend not to hunt people unless they’re too injured to chase smaller prey.” But Iroh agreed with her. “That’s not reassuring enough that I’m eager to risk another night like the last.”

“We can’t sleep on the boat _every_ night,” Sana agreed. “I have an idea, but you might not like it.”

“I didn’t like having my leg ripped open,” Iroh pointed out, his tone joking, even if he was speaking the truth. “Let’s hear it.”

Sana’s hesitance was slightly illuminated with eagerness. “The sea grotto I found isn’t easy to get into if you’re not already good at diving,” she said, “but that’s what makes it such a good choice. We’d be safe from storms and animals there. Plus, once you’re in, the water’s shaded, so it’d be much easier for you to practice diving without getting burnt. We could climb up through the jungle and slide down in on an ice ramp.”

Iroh wondered if her eagerness to get back to the grotto she’d described with such excitement was clouding her judgment regarding his own ability to safely navigate deep water. But the prospect of nights spent waiting for more leopard crabs to silently yank one or both of them out to their death was already exhausting, and if nothing else, at the end of this month he’d have a new skill.

“Why not?” He accepted. “It sounds better than a month without sleep.”

~~~~

They would have to leave the sandeq far less well attended, to live in the grotto. They scouted the edge of the jungle for a suitable place to beach it beyond the reach of the tide, and settled on two ancient flame trees, with thick, gnarled trunks and sturdy branches heavy with orange flowers. They worked in cooperative effort to clear the brush, Sana removing the water from the plants before Iroh burnt them clear. Sana washed the boat into the slot in the jungle, far past high tideline, safer from an unexpected storm than it had been on the sand.

The remainder of their goal for the day was to reach the cliff where Sana promised a hole dropped into the security of the grotto, an uphill slog through dense jungle. At least, it would have been a slog, without the cooperation of a water and a firebender. They settled into a rhythm within a few minutes of practice. Sana walked behind Iroh and desiccated the plants in a left-arm, right-arm sweep that collected water behind her in an endless lemniscate, and he followed her rhythm with left-right jabs of fire that reduced the brush immediately to ash. He withheld heat from his jabs to minimize the possibility of leaving an ember to start a wildfire, but on the off chance that his control slipped and he left one, it drowned in the bottom curves of the lemniscate that Sana swept along the ground behind them. Razor-edged grass vanished in puffs of ash, leaving the flowering flame trees and plumeria to border the path they forged. They foraged as they hiked, pausing to spot papaya and mango trees, fresh bunches of green coconut, and clear trails to the food. By midday the ditch bag was full of mango and green papaya, sprigs of lemongrass alongside the frozen crabclaw they had left from the morning. They paused in the high heat to drink green coconut water with sprigs of crushed lemongrass, fresh ice pulled out of the air to chill the flavored refreshment, admiring the distance they'd already climbed

The elephant grass fell away as they reached a red dirt ridge rising sharply up. The climbing became harder. Thorny trees clung to the mountainside, making hazardous handholds. Their refreshment pauses became pauses to heal their thorn-scraped hands. 

The sun was drifting low by the time the ground beneath them plateaued into a short growth of coarse, short grass and the sky opened before them. The cliff was ascended, the hole into the grotto a cool darkness from which the sound of the sea sighed continuously, the cliff edge beyond towering over the ocean and the lowering sun. Scattered islands in the distance gleamed black and mysterious and numerous against the deepening sunset.

Iroh picked his way around the edge of the cliff, until he stood where just the day before he’d considered how pleasant a vacation home would be to have there. A construction crew to build a house would use up time and materials that could be better spent in the push to take Ba Sing Se, but once the war was won, once his destiny was achieved, if he achieved it soon enough, perhaps a home here would be his first victory present to himself.

Sana had crept up to stand beside him on the ridge. “Amazing how there’s always so much of it, isn’t it?” she sighed, looking over the ocean. Another piece of evidence that her tribe was inland, not coastal. “I never get blind to how big it is -”

Her sighing reverence made him chuckle. “If you haven’t seen it every day, I suppose it would be astonishing.”

“Oh, I’ll look at it every day of my life and not get tired,” she said, as if making a promise to herself.

They sat to watch the sunset, arms touching, sipped coconut water, ate papaya and crabclaw. The sun hadn’t touched the water before they were kissing again. If there was a green flash, they missed it.

In the dim after sunset, Iroh yawned as Sana bent water up and out of the grotto into an ice slide, but his weariness vanished as soon as he jumped on the freezing slide and whirled through the dark into the splash of the warm water. Blue light exploded around him as he plunged into the dark water, surprising him with its brilliance. The light faded where he left the water undisturbed, but followed his every motion before vanishing back into darkness.

He lifted a hand above the calm surface of the saltwater and lit a fire in his palm. Sana was already crouched on an outcrop of rock, and she swept him up on a wave that glowed blue as she bent the water. The blue glow flashed and faded constantly where the waves broke on the rocks.

It was impossible to miss - unless you couldn’t see it at all, and Sana wasn’t even looking at the light, her attention devoted instead to the plumeria tree that grew past the waterline, in the sand where the full light of noon would fall. The tree, covered with blossoms, filled the cavern with its sweet fragrance. “D’you think it would be disrespectful to hang the tarp from one of its branches?” she asked.

She’d have spoken of the blue lights if she could see them, Iroh was sure. But she hadn’t said a word - so this must be another thing that only his eyes could see. His mother seemed to come to his mind so often in this place, and here were her words again, the first time as a young boy he’d come to her frustrated when nobody had believed him the first time he saw a phoenix rise from the flametree that bloomed in the center of the Fire Nation capital. 

Second sight skipped many generations at a time through Ilah’s clan, but she immediately recognized her son’s claims for yet another gift alongside the firebending he’d been born to so powerfully wield. Ilah had been so proud - even as she’d advised him to keep his visions protected information. 

“Better to let others tell you what they see, and never give them more information than they believe is available,” she’d taught him, saying again - “for _information is the currency of war,_ and you are blessed with more of it.”

Others would always accuse him of lying when they could never have proof that he saw what he saw, and so the advantage was for him alone. “But some secrets need a relief valve,” Ilah had admitted, when she’d finished telling him the tale of his great grandfather through her clan’s side - a masterful admiral whose ships had never once sailed through rough weather while he advised their helmsman. “So I think you should at least tell me.”

He’d been all too thrilled to tell her when he had his vision of conquering Ba Sing Se. He’d never found the voice to tell her of his vision of her death. Though she hadn’t lived to see him approach the victory that defined his destiny, he would remember her pride on that day that he achieved it.

“Disrespectful?” he repeated, to Sana’s question, waiting for her to tell him the fraction of information someone without second sight could glean about this place.

“Well I don’t know, it just seems so stately here all by itself. Like it ain’t no average tree, like it’s special,” Sana said. The blue glow rippled across the waves that lapped at the stone, but her eyes were firmly on the yellow and white blossoms illuminated by Iroh’s handful of fire. “Don’t this feel like a special place to you?”

It was absolutely a special place. His skin vibrated with spiritual energy. The water rippled with it in beautiful sparks as blue as the heart of a hot flame.

“You tell me,” he said. “There are sacred cenotes back home, but none that are half sea.”

A misty energy rose from the plumeria tree like silver fireflies, and every intake of breath left him . . . calmer than he expected. It was not a drugged calm, but a cool and soothing touch, like fingertips caressing one’s cheek. Both invigorating and so welcomely calming.

He took advantage of the opportunity to draw his fingertips across Sana’s cheek, letting his handful of fire go out. A gesture of affection seemed more appropriate for this space than fire did. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, tiredness came on him again.

She smiled at him. “I don’t think we need to put up the tarp anyway,” she concluded. “The stone overhangs the sand there - if it rains the water will run down from us. We can lie flat on the tarp. How roomy.”

Iroh yawned, already pulling the tarp out of the ditch bag. “I’m looking forward to that.”

“The sun goes down and you go with it,” Sana teased, as she took a corner.

Iroh was asleep the moment he rolled over onto the tarp. Sana surprised him by joining him right away, no doubt tired out from the short night and long day. She’d tucked a fallen flower into her hair, and with a deep breath of both her hair and the plumeria that filled the cavern, he was deep in a dream so soothing that it was better not to wake from.

~~~~

Dawn revealed the full loveliness of the grotto.

It reminded Iroh of the freshwater cenotes that dotted the Fire Nation, the water turquoise and clear, but all the way down to the brown-and-green coral ringing the sand bottom, swarmed with fish. Sunlight shone in from the cave mouths to the open ocean, and the water at those light filled edges was so intense and electric a cerulean that the whole grotto seemed rimmed with liquid lightning. It was different from the spirit glow he’d seen the night before, which had vanished in the light of day pouring through the roof. A single beam of sunlight fell on the black rock that rose against the shifting sea, cradling the sand beach and the plumeria tree at the back of the cavern. Iroh climbed the rock to sit on its rough surface and take in the sunlight.

He wanted to greet the dawn in his usual manner, but firebending anything more than a handful for illumination felt . . . tactless here. Like holding an agni kai in a garden. The heat of the air had no impact on the feeling of coolness, of soothing, flowing energy that he could describe best as _the opposite_ of the way his awareness had been ignited on the island of the Sun Warriors, where the energy of the Firebending Masters had permeated every volcano-shaped stone. Perhaps that energy had drawn Sana there, for her to have found it so easily - the deep, oceanic energy drawing a waterbender, as he’d once been drawn to hunt down the Firebending Masters.

If he were to greet the sun in his usual manner while they camped here, he have to learn Sana’s secrets of diving sooner rather than later.

He passed the morning in meditation while Sana slept, the soothing energy easing him faster than ever before into no-mind. He hadn’t meant to match his breaths to the sound of the waves, but they did, and he’d been inhaling and exhaling with the waves for nearly an hour before he marked that he was doing it. The coolness had painted his mind all in blue, his awareness floating as easily as Sana did on the uplifting waves -

A sudden irrational fear lanced through him at the coolness he had waded into with his meditation. Was a firebender who made himself too open to this energy in danger of extinguishing his own flame? His mental calm was so abruptly shattered by the horror story of a thought that Iroh abruptly opened his eyes and held out a hand to check -

\- his internal heat rose as quickly as ever at his breath and flame overflowed in his palm. He felt silly at caving into fear. What was ignited in him at birth could never be lost - no one in the history of the Fire Nation had ever proven themselves unworthy enough of their gift to have lost it.

Sana yawned behind him. He stood up quickly and picked his way across the rough stone in his excitement to greet her. The island was not _lonely_ while she slept, but it was far more interesting while she was awake.

“You missed the morning again,” he said, sliding in beside her mid-stretch. She was less than fully awake, her laughter groggy, but she rolled towards him and accepted his arms around her, offering her own. She met his good morning kiss with hers. 

“Well, what do you think?” she asked, when they’d greeted each other adequately. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It’s the loveliest place I’ve ever been unable to leave,” Iroh agreed.

“Oh, you’ll be able to get out,” she promised, sitting up. “It’ll be getting back in without me that’ll be the trick.” She took a deep breath of the air. “That plumeria scent never goes away, does it?” 

His nose had never gone blind to the smell, not all morning. The tree filled the grotto with its sweet smell. “I think you were right, to say it’s a special tree.”

“I think this whole place is special,” she said, looking around the grotto, the beams of morning sunlight cutting shafts into the turquoise water, the bougainvillea draping around the hole in the roof, drops of water sparkling as they dripped from the hanging vines. Iroh could still, faintly, see the spirit energy rising from the plumeria tree, silvery in the sunlight, but Sana’s gaze didn’t linger on their upward track. Her eyes landed back on his. “I was thinking about it last night, but I don’t think we should kill anything in here.”

Iroh thought of the fish swarming the deep bowl and the reef. “Then we’d better figure a way out sooner than later.” His stomach growled. “I already ate most of the papaya.”

Sana reached upward, stretching, and yawned again. “Let’s get going then,” she said, through her yawn. “No time like now to start practicing. Hold on,” she said, as Iroh got up to make his way to the ocean. “I gotta teach you how to clear your ears before we jump in the sea.”

He sat across from her. His ears had felt like someone was taking knives to the sides of his head when he’d tried to follow her to the seafloor their first morning, and he was eager to avoid that pain.

Sana reached out and pinched his nose shut. “Breathe out.”

He exhaled through his mouth.

“No,” she said. “Pretend I don’t got your nose, and exhale against the pressure until you feel it in your ears.”

She put the fingertips of her other hand at the crease where his nose met his cheeks. Iroh blew out, but the resistance of her fingers pinching his nose shut seemed to inflate his nose and not do much else. She shook her head.

“Harder,” she said. “Use your lungs if you gotta, just to get the feel for it -”

Iroh exhaled through his mouth, and took another breath. This time he engaged his diaphragm, forcing air against her fingers as if trying to overpower her grip with the flare of his nostrils. Instead, the pressure seemed to force liquid into his ears, changing the tone of the ocean in his left.

“Is it supposed to deafen me?” he asked, his voice made nasal.

“If you do that underwater, it relieves the pressure,” she said, seeming satisfied by his results. “Now try to do that without using anything below your neck,” she said, putting her hand on his stomach. “Use your throat and your tongue instead of your diaphragm. It uses less breath up.”

He was reminded of the feeling of going up a tall mountain, and needing to yawn to relieve the painful sensation in his ears. He yawned, and the pressure relieved itself, the temporarily fuzzed sense of hearing popped and cleared.

That pop made the pieces fall into place. He suddenly identified the feeling of too much pressure within oneself atop a high mountain, compared too much pressure _without_ oneself when going the opposite direction beneath the ocean.

Iroh took another breath, pinched his nose shut and pressed the back of his throat and tongue to the roof of his mouth, feeling the pressure mount in his ears as he imagined his mouth full of water he could not let slide down into his lungs. His hearing dulled as pressure build up in his ears.

Sana took her hand away from his stomach. “I think you got it,” she said, pleased, putting a hand to his throat to feel the muscle contractions there. “You ready to try it underwater?” 

Iroh remembered that he was doing this for the purpose of expressly getting _deeper in the water,_ closer to drowning then - well, maybe not closer than he’d ever been in his life, but closer than he’d ever come on purpose. “Only one way to find out,” he said. 

Not wishing to seem like he’d been rattled by his near-drowning only a few days ago, he ran theatrically up the central rock and flipped theatrically into the air and the dragging plunge of the sea.

He hadn’t reached the surface before Sana crashed through next to him, but her perfect dive took her on a deep arc underneath him. Iroh broke the surface, sucking in air as he treaded. The form she’d taught him the day before made treading less difficult, but he wouldn’t have called it by any stretch easy to keep his head above water. Sana surfaced next to him with a calm, deep inhale, already seeming more serene at being in the water.

She’d brought a floatvest with them in her ditch kit. She pushed the vest at him and Iroh hung onto it, relieved at the assistance.

“You know, you’re gonna be real good at diving,” Sana said, which struck him as an odd conclusion to have reached. “You won’t have to fight your way down below the Doorway like I do.”

“Seems like being good at sinking will only make half of diving easy,” Iroh said. “What about the return trip?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, very carelessly for someone speaking to another who was not a waterbender. “I won’t let you drown.”

He at least trusted that that was the truth.

Sana handed him a bamboo clip. “When I say to, put this on your nose, but to begin with, you gotta breathe up. Roll over on your back. You can lie on the vest, but you gotta relax as much as possible, and take breaths as deep and slow as possible. Imagine you’re trying to get to sleep after a long day. When you’re done breathing up, I wanna see how long you can hold your breath. I’ll tell you when to roll over and hold. Your job is to relax as much as possible. You hold your longest breath when you’re relaxed.”

Firebenders were good at deep breathing. Iroh had been studiously practicing the deepest inhale possible since he’d met the Masters, and breathing drills were the first form of training he could remember receiving. But holding breath in was anathema to a firebender. Who would cut off their own fuel by keeping it inside to run out, rather than unleashing it in the longest, most fiercely propelled stream possible? 

A waterbender would, apparently, and what would his mother say if she could see him learning breathing techniques from a waterbender -? His father would surely say he was wasting his time and honor by not killing her, but his mother would repeat - that _information was the currency of war_ , and he was being blessed with more of it.

“Take your last breath and hold,” Sana instructed. “When you’re ready, put the clip on and roll over. Slow movements. As little effort as possible.”

Waterbending was so strange. Less effort, in Firebending, only made for ineffectual fire that ghosted harmlessly across an opponent’s skin. Iroh drew in his deepest breath yet, slid the clip onto his nose, and rolled over, face down in the sea.

The first handful of seconds were fine, but after a mere moment Iroh’s lungs felt overfull. He wanted to exhale, suddenly uncomfortable with the pressure within, as if his closed lungs were swelling as they converted air into . . . whatever lungs converted air into. 

He fought against the growing pressure until his breath burst out of him, the water boiling at his exhalation. He rolled away from his expressed heat, sucking in air as water welled up beneath him, lifting him to the surface.

Sana was waterbending him up. She pushed the floatvest into his arms. “You almost got a whole minute,” she said, encouraging. “That’s good for a first timer!”

“Almost?” Iroh was dismayed. That had felt like an eternity. “How can your best be seven minutes? That felt like five.”

“I been doin’ this since before I could walk,” Sana soothed. “Whereas you been, what, spittin’ fire since then? I can’t spit fire at all. At least you can hold your breath.”

“You can’t possibly hold seven times the air I can,” Iroh protested. “Firebending is _powered_ by the breath. I know I can take a deeper breath than many firebenders -”

“It’s only part about the deepness of your breath. The other part is resisting letting the breath go,” Sana said. “You know, when you exhale, there’s still good air in your lungs. There’s a technique we use when someone’s come near to drowning, where one person forces their own breath into someone else’s lungs. If your lungs scrubbed all the good stuff out of the air immediately and exhaled only trash, that wouldn’t work, would it?”

Iroh made a mental note to ask to learn that technique next.

“You gotta resist the urge to replace your breath,” she went on. “The first step is realizing that you don’t need to replace it as fast as you feel you do. It takes so much longer than you think it does for a conscious person to drown.”

Iroh sat half-up in the water, holding onto the float vest. “That’s the most alarming thing you’ve said in the entire time I’ve known you.”

Sana looked suddenly self-conscious. 

“I ain’t gonna let you drown,” she said. She paused, looking at him. “You don’t really want to learn this, do you?”

“I _want_ to be able to get in and out of here without having to wake you up every morning,” Iroh said. “It’s a good, safe place to camp,” he reassured her. She seemed so brought-down so suddenly. “I can’t promise you I’ll ever love the idea of being as far underwater as a waterbender likes to be.”

Sana inhaled and exhaled a long breath. “Well, I just wanna keep you alive. I ain’t gotta make you love anything.”

The Fire Nation was full of women poised like leopardcrabs in waiting for any opening to inspire and ensnare his love. He wondered if she’d change her mind and join their ranks if she knew his true identity.

He smiled, reassuring her. “I don’t have to love something to know I need to learn it. What’s my next lesson, sifu?”

The flattery of the title brought a half-smile back to her face. “Three fathoms deep,” she said. It sounded like so little, there on the surface, and yet -

Iroh sighed after watching her demonstrate the depth. Three fathoms looked twice as far underwater as it did on land.

But this was the lesson he’d asked for. He inhaled, dove, and put the waterbender’s teaching to good use.

~~~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Using bending for birth control was, obviously, not an issue that needed to come up in the show, but I thought about it too much. The details of the swampbenders’ techniques will come up in the future.
> 
> The blue spirit-glow described in the grotto is based on real life bioluminescent phytoplankton. I’ve never seen it anywhere but in a youtube video, but it’s on the bucket list.
> 
> The technique Sana teaches Iroh in this chapter is called the frenzel method (using the tongue and throat to manipulate air pressure in the sinuses), with a brief pass through the valsalva method (employing the diaphragm) to get him there. Some people can equalize pressure hands-free just by cracking their jaws in a certain way, and until further notice I’m jealous of them.


	9. I've Weathered Every Storm So Far

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter’s title is from Close by 3LAU feat. Oly.
> 
> Just a heads up that there are descriptions of death by stroke and brain cancer in this chapter, in case anyone has trouble with either of those.

By lunchtime he’d made it to three fathoms, but no deeper.

The pain in his ears kept on rising up, never going away in time for his breath to last him a little farther down. His ears felt clogged and sore all the way down into his throat when they left the water for a break. “Every outlet is twice as deep as I’ve gone,” Iroh grumbled, as the waves washed serenely through the cavern. “I’ll never get out at this rate.”

“Don’t get discouraged,” Sana said, all calm smiles where he was growing frustration. She was blissed out on the hours they’d spent floating in the sea, cool and soothed in the shade of the grotto. “Just because you can’t make the depth yet doesn’t mean you’re not building the skills you need. If you made depth right now, you might not actually be able to hold your breath long enough to swim out. You need to take your time underwater, work on your breath hold and your ear clearing. Depth will follow once you get those two.”

“I’m so close though,” Iroh objected. He felt nearly deaf on his right side. He attempted to shake the water out of his ear. “I can get past the pain. It’s just a distraction.”

“No it’s not, it’s a warning!” Sana looked up from her bliss with a sudden sharpness. “You tough the pain out and you’re just gonna bust an ear. Those are complicated to heal!”

“It’s just a few more feet,” Iroh insisted. “I’m too close to give up.”

Sana exhaled slow, like she was trying to solve a puzzle. “Maybe having a target you can see is the wrong way to teach a firebender,” she said. “You see a goal and you want to burn a hole right through it. But you gotta hold several things in your awareness while diving, not narrow your focus to one at the expense of everything else.”

“I have very good situational awareness,” Iroh objected. Not being good at something was making him grumpy, but as his stomach rumbled loudly, he realized he might have also simply been ravenous. If he let his hurt pride and his hunger wreck his courtesies, Sana might want to teach him less, possibly not ask him to make love to her again once they were done for the day. 

That threat made him take a deep, calming breath, unwilling to let his pride risk ruining his chance at a night’s pleasure. The memory of her hands tangled in his hair the night before, and her willful enjoyment of his attention when they forgot to watch for the green flash sparked excitement that was a challenge to draw his focus away from, particularly to a task that a firebender was so ill suited to. 

He softened his mood. “But you are teaching me something I’ve never learned before.” He had promised to attend her training with the attitude of a student. Opening his awareness was well and good, for sitting in meditation at a site of great spiritual power - like training at a Fire Sage temple, or taking in the teachings of the Masters on their island - and this was a place of great spiritual power, even if it wasn’t the power attuned to his. “So - how will you test me, if not with a depth?”

“I think we’ll switch to time,” Sana said. “I’ll have to rig something up after lunch.”

They had the rest of the coconut crab meat, already cooked and encased in a block of ice that Sana had replenished since the day before. The green bananas they’d found were still ripening in the alcove, but green papaya with sea salt and the sweetness of mango juice evaporated and thickened to a syrup, sliced and pounded together with the coconut crabmeat, was crunchy and satisfying. They filled in the gaps chewing on pieces of white coconut meat as they lay back on the sand, in no hurry to get back to work.

“How are your ears?” Sana asked, sliding up next to Iroh to idly graze her fingertips along his neck while they digested. The cool of the grotto brought her closer to him even more frequently than she touched him in the direct sun, where he vented so much heat passively that sometimes the air around him rippled without him noticing.

“Better,” he said, considering. The sensation of seawater in his ears had gone away slowly over the course of the meal, and his hearing no longer felt dulled.

“Good,” she said, finishing her piece of coconut and turning on her side, leaning her head on her hand. She let her free hand rest comfortably, familiarly, on his bicep. “I’m sorry this isn’t much fun for you,” she said, her smile wry. “It’d be nice if we could just spend all this free time enjoyin’ ourselves, but survivin’ is always a little work.”

“Plenty of important things aren’t fun,” Iroh said. “But everything important is better done in a beautiful place, with great food, and a beautiful companion - I’ve done plenty of hard work and been lucky to get even one of those three at a time.” He lifted his hand to draw his finger down Sana’s cheek, thinking again back to last sunset, interest stirring in him to have her love again. “This is the best vacation I’ve had in years.”

“Me too,” Sana admitted, and somehow that was what brought a blush to her face.

“I thought you were still working,” Iroh pointed out. “Keeping a valuable customer alive in the middle of nowhere?”

“A working vacation’s still a vacation,” she said, her lips parting in a smile that invited kisses. “You know if the storm hadn’t happened, we’d have said goodbye already,” she pointed out. “We’d have said it yesterday, if you’d found me in Changbao the day before, like I asked you to.”

“Oh, you mean we got ahead of schedule?” Iroh said, suddenly seeing the humor. “I planned to hold off on leaving for the Colonies until I’d shown you the nearest inn with silk sheets. Were you going to accept?”

Sana leaned over and kissed his cheek. “I was considerin’ it.”

A lack of silk sheets hadn’t hurt his prospects. He wondered if a single night of Changbao’s hospitality could have lent themselves to a passion that approached their need for each other after coming so many times so close to death, after rescuing each other from pain and finding each other’s company such a ward against boredom or loneliness. Sana drew her lips away from his cheek, and he rose up on his elbows to kiss her lips again.

Perhaps having had her already had ignited his desire with a pilot light that never quite went out, now that he knew he could have her, but his desire rose faster than he expected as they kissed, and he found himself needing to put his arms around her, roll her onto the sand to feel her soft and receptive against him, her tongue between his lips and her arms around his back, drawing him in, already sighing her own desire.

Iroh drew back from kissing the woman who had his life in her hands, to get his breath back and catch a glimpse of her expression of desire. The silvery energy drifting from the plumeria tree, nearly invisible in the full light of day, swirled around her, and perhaps around him too - clockwise as if drawn by a gentle current. 

It hadn’t done that before they kissed. The energy of this powerful place reacted to the love he was increasingly compelled to make to her. He was perfectly eager to go with it.

He kissed her lips, grabbed her thigh and slid her leg around his hip - but paused as her sighs of desire turned to refusal.

“I want to,” she said, which was in contrast to her hands on his chest, her head back on the sand, pushing him away, “but this place - it’s kinda -” she winced. “It could be disrespectful, couldn’t it? Fuckin’ in a sacred place?”

He wasn’t convinced that the particular sacredness of this place was offended by mortal pleasure. She couldn’t see the way the energy flowed in a mirror to the rising energy of their desire - and he couldn’t tell her about it without giving away his second sight, which at best would make him sound like a liar.

“You . . . must be right,” he lied. “Of course. We should keep this where the spirits aren’t likely to see something they don’t want to.”

He couldn’t stay on top of her, with her chest rising and falling underneath his touch and her lips so full from kissing and her eyes half-lidded and abate his desire to have her immediately. He backed off, his breathing a little faster than usual as he sat beside her on the sand. The cool of the water when they got back to work would take care of his arousal. But that meant -

Iroh frowned. “I must master diving before I can make love to you again?” He exhaled. “Well, if I’d needed motivation, that would have done it.”

“I was going to build ice steps up and out,” Sana said. “Don’t worry.” Her eyes were still lidded as she leaned in, drawing her fingers along his neck below the line of his beard. “I want you too much not to wanna see the sunset.”

He barely resisted the urge to pull her into his arms and get them right back in the position they’d just had to pull themselves away from. Sana, feeling the same draw, forcibly sat back on her heels, tucking her hair behind her ears as she cast around for a neutral topic.

“What were you goin’ to the colonies for, anyway?” she landed on.

Telling her about the anniversary of the comet would link him too deeply into the Fire Nation royal ceremony. “I hadn’t taken leave since my mother died,” he said, which was true. “I got permission to return for my father’s birthday.”

“Oh, no,” she said, suddenly dismayed. “And you’re going to miss it!”

“I think my father will be relieved when I’m alive at all,” he pointed out. “He won’t mind my missing an important day if I’m alive after all this.”

It was true enough. The Fire Nation itself might not currently be aware their crown prince was missing as long as Jeong Jeong had reason to believe that searching the sea was still worth it to find him, but Azulon would be weighing the worth of declaring him dead or not. He would likely hold off from throwing his nation into mourning until after the anniversary. Iroh wondered if he’d wind up returning home in time to crash his own funeral, and chuckled at the image.

“What do you think, do they think I’m dead, or does the Captain have faith that you can keep me alive?” he asked. “I might return home in time to crash my own funeral.”

“I'd pay money to see that,” Sana giggled. She looked thoughtful. “Captain Fang will have faith in me. Question is, will she tell your men she has that much faith?”

“If she’s told them you’re a waterbender -”

“She wouldn’t do that. It would be suicide,” Sana said. “Harboring a waterbender instead of collecting the bounty for one? She’ll never tell. But she’ll do her best to reassure them you ain’t dead.”

Then the paperwork declaring Ozai the new Crown Prince wouldn’t have a signature on it for a while. “They’ll hold out hope,” he agreed. “My men would hate for me to be dead.”

“Your father must be so upset right now,” she mused, sounding so pitying over the most powerful man in the world that Iroh almost snorted, imagining Azulon’s reception of her pity. “Between you and your mother, he thinks he’s lost the two people he loves most in the space of two years.”

Iroh remembered Azulon’s dismayed response to Ilah’s sudden death - the quiet shock that the Fire Lord had displayed was, perhaps, his brilliantly detached and focused father’s way of showing loving grief. It startled him to think of. He’d never truly considered whether his father had loved his mother or not. Love was the least important thing that had factored into their marriage, but that didn’t mean it had never become a factor, over the years since they’d wed. That Azulon could have loved Ilah in addition to valuing and respecting her was . . . a possibility, now that he considered it. 

He didn’t, however, have to wonder his father’s perspective on him. He’d figured out his position long ago.

“My father doesn’t love me,” Iroh corrected. “He _likes_ me.”

Sana sat up on her elbow. “That sounds so cold,” she said, then snorted. “Especially for a Fire National.”

It was far safer for him not to forget it. His mother had loved him. Azulon’s approval was far more conditional. “My father likes what I’ve accomplished already. If I didn’t keep impressing him, there’d be consequences.”

“He sounds more like a boss than family.”

“That’s . . . more than fair.” 

It was why his family ruled the world while families like Sana’s, less cohesive, more disorganized, willing to let their powerful heir simply run off into the wilderness on a whim, were poor enough that a beautiful and resourceful and powerful bender of a daughter had both the freedom to run off on a whim, and the willingness to eat food out of the dirt and call herself lucky to get it. A firebender with Sana’s looks and power would never find anything better to do out in the rest of the world than the wealth and responsibility and power the Fire Nation would immediately honor her with. 

Actually - if this woman had been born to the Fire Nation, with fire in her soul instead of water, her empathetic resourcefulness and attentive nature could have made her a contender for arrangement to marry very high. Not enough to marry him, when his marriage had been arranged before the appropriate family from the appropriate clan even had conceived a daughter who could become his Fire Lady, but high enough that he probably would have met her, and had this same affair before his marriage was conducted. Hopefully in that other lifetime she wasn’t already married, for him to have to navigate the maze of etiquette that even a crown prince had to walk when he desired another man’s wife and was desired back.

Love did not make a powerful family. But maybe love could come out of a powerful union, like the one that Azulon had married his mother to forge. Maybe love could come eventually out of the powerful union he was already arranged to. But unions of love did not rule the world - perfectly orchestrated unions of power did.

“What about the rest of your family?” Sana entreated, lying back on the sand, her arm still touching his, as if she couldn’t quite bear not to have some part of her skin on his at all times. “Must’ve been so nice to have your Ma as a bending tutor. Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“A little brother. VERY little. He was three last I saw him.” Iroh thought about the fretful second prince that Ozai was, quick to tantrum and such a challenge that the nurse hired to raise him had to be seconded by a firebender, to put out the toddler’s errant blasts before they could hurt his nurse or set the castle on fire. Ozai was already a prodigious firebender, but he was also prodigiously emotional, and those were not a great combination of features to have in a toddler. “He’s a little too temperamental to be ideal.”

“He’s a baby. They’re supposed to be temperamental.”

Iroh chuckled. “You might not have so much sympathy if YOU were the nurse he keeps almost setting on fire.”

“Oh,” Sana winced. “I hadn’t thought about that. A toddler who can breathe fire! That would test anyone’s patience.”

“He is still a child,” Iroh amended. It wouldn’t quite do to speak ill of a prince, even a prince subordinate to him. “He has time to grow out of it. I shouldn’t be so unkind. And he will never know our mother enough to miss her. I pity him for that.” He grew somber again, thinking of Ilah - thinking of the way Ozai had screamed in a tantrum through her funeral, as if kicking off this new world without their brilliant mother in it in the worst way possible. The world HAD felt its worst at that moment.

Sana put her hand on his shoulder. “You miss her so much.”

“I do.” He inhaled deeply. “I will keep on missing her.” 

“How did she die?”

“Suddenly.” Suddenly was the simplest way to frame Ilah’s death. “She was mid-sentence to a visitor at a garden party, and out of nowhere she shook as if struck by lightning, and fell to the ground. She was dead by the time any medics arrived.” At least there had been enough witnesses that no one suffered the indignity of being accused of her murder. 

Sana put a hand to her mouth, thoughtful, as if considering the symptoms. “I’ve known of some elders died that way. But your mother couldn’t have been an elder?” He confirmed that she had not with a shake of his head. “How terrible. I’m so sorry. The shock must’ve been awful.”

“I had considered, during childhood, what life might be like if my mother or father passed away,” he said. It was true. As Ozai grew closer to the age he’d seen his younger brother in the vision of Ilah’s funeral, and Ilah had gone on being in perfectly good health as befit a middle-aged firebending master, he’d begun to doubt his vision and to hope it were not true. He could have stood losing faith in his vision of taking Ba Sing Se if it meant more years of his mother’s guidance. But she had taken all his doubt to the funeral pyre with her. “It didn’t make me miss her less, but it did help to have thought it out before hand. It gave me the perspective to cherish our time together.”

And it helped to know that he would be a great Fire Lord in her honor.

“Well she must have been an amazing firebender,” Sana said. “Not that I know much about firebending.” Her tone was sympathetic, joking. “But you sure look like you know what you’re doing, when you do it.”

“She was a great firebender,” Iroh assured her. “Some say she was the second-best in the nation, after the Fire Lord himself.”

The some who said it included the Fire Lord himself. Azulon had married Ilah for many talents she’d displayed in the field, but above all others, he had valued that practical purpose.

“She sounds wonderful.”

“She was. I was lucky to be her son.” He was lucky in so many ways for his birthright, and to say so in the Fire Nation could have been taken as a slight against his father for not saying foremost and only that he was blessed with the highest and most singular of honor in being the Fire Lord’s son - but it had not been busy Azulon who had greeted the dawn with him each morning, or tutored him privately first in all lessons, so that he had the safety and the freedom to make his first mistakes where only Ilah would see and correct them. So that he had the joy of learning to firebend from someone whose first lesson had been to take joy in the blessing that was being born of fire. 

Azulon was many things, but one of them was not joyful. Ilah had been serious, focused, exacting, and as any good firebending master would, permitted no disrespect from her son to his teachers, his art, his station - but she had wound joy into her many life lessons anyway.

He would always miss their private mornings, the games she played with him to hone his skills past the point where there was even the possibility that he could make an error in form, the warmth and kindness that another who looked in on the Fire Lady training her son could have mistaken for a lack of seriousness, if they made the mistake of conflating dourness with effectiveness.

“Do you get to talk about her with your Pa a lot?” Sana asked. “Does he bend with you?”

Iroh considered that possibility. “Perhaps he will, now that I am trained,” he said. “It won’t be like training with my mother. She was teaching a student. My father will be looking for ways that my mastery is imperfect. If he finds them -” Iroh shrugged. His mastery was indisputable by anyone he’d ever sparred with since his mother had pronounced him a master, but Azulon was . . . He was Azulon, the firebending prodigy and brilliant engineer who saw every detail and always found something to improve, and was always offended that it had taken his time to spot the error rather than being caught by the people he relied on to ease his workload. “When he finds them I will have drills to do until they don’t exist anymore. It won’t be a tropical beach vacation.”

“That sounds exhausting,” Sana said, “Always having to be producing results, living up to standards even to your family.”

That was a strange thing for her to say. There wasn’t a Fire Nation family of any standing who didn’t hold their children up to high standards, and keep some of those standards so high they were out of reach to discourage complacency, the enemy of excellence. 

But then, that was the difference between the Fire Nation and all the other bending nations of the world.

“Traveling across the whole world because it would have been harder to stay home makes your family sound exhausting too,” he pointed out. Sure, Fire Nation court life was tiring. It was why he treasured downtime like this to the fullest, and returned to the field and the court refreshed by it, ready for another round of the games of civility and war. “Did you travel north just to learn healing, or were you running from something?”

~~~~

“Were you running from something?”

Sana realized she could frame it like that. Running from the obligation of having to always be in the same place each night, to drag herself away from whatever better option had presented itself during the day to go back to the same group of people she didn’t like, laughing over the same mean stories, keeping her trapped in the circle of their firelight by the invisible tethers of familial obligation so much longer than they needed to, where everything she said was strange or morbid, because they spent their days doing the real work of ferretfish noodling while she played with silly little kids and fussed in the scrolls and hung too much around the bog of the dead. They had no interest in talking about kids waterbending, when they’d never waterbend themselves, no interest in reading the scrolls because who cared about air temples and enormous walled cities and the endless, deadly expanse of the sea when they could tell, yet again, the outrageous tale of when Kenui had the temerity to use Jiu’s best fishing line and break it (how dare he), or all the things that Jiu had done for his ungrateful former gal who was all the way on the other side of the swamp with the Oxbow Clan now that she’d cut ties (how dare she), and every other way that everyone else in the clan was wrong and rude and couldn’t act right, including Sana, who never had anything to say that was worth hearing, and never did keep the cups full like she’d promised her brother she would. She had _one job_. And it wasn’t to bore them with toddler talk, airhead stories, or worse, afternoons with Tei - 

“You gotta stop hangin’ out with that deathkeeper,” Jiu would just say, every time she brought up her best friend ever, as if the way that Tei conducted their funeral rituals with dignity and without fear were anything less than a heroic kindness, and an astonishing display of her bending power.

“She’s makin’ you creepier every day,” added any one of his friends, the ones Jiu was always telling her she was so up herself for not taking up with. “It’s not attractive.”

Sana took a long breath and exhaled. She didn’t want to complain about them. All they did was complain about everyone else. But dragging herself away from her friends’ company, from the kids inviting her to their family’s fires for the night, just away from the loveliness of twilight in the swamp when the fog cleared and the trees were black against the cerulean blue of the sky, the fisherfrogs and cicadabirds singing so sweet, to block it all out with the light of her brother’s fire and the voices of his complaints, had been the worst part of her day, every day. She was shocked at how long she’d just gone on letting it be part of her day, when always, always, the current in the swamp tugged at her ankles, pulling her west, even when all the other waterbenders insisted they felt no current at all -

She’d turned aside Iroh’s questions about her choice to wander the other night, but it was the day after tomorrow, and she’d promised him answers yesterday that they’d turned out not to have time for.

“No - and yes,” she said. “It’s said that when our people left the north, they left great healers there. I always thought it was kind of a tall tale, but maybe if I’d known how good they were, I’d have gone straight there instead of meandering around the Earth Kingdom as much as I did.” But the river, and its westward current only she’d felt, had pulled her so strong. “When Pa got sick, he got real sick real fast, but he stayed alive for so long. We got great doctors, but they still couldn’t do much. Maybe that’s why I’ve never been good at it. Maybe I just don’t believe in it enough. Maybe if I’d heard about what the Northern girls could do, I’d have gone North faster, been better at it from the start.” She shrugged. “What’s gone by is gone by.”

“That’s a whole lot about what didn’t make you leave,” Iroh pointed out.

Sana frowned. “I love my home,” she said, stubbornly. The singing at night, her students, her friends, the endless braided rivers, the deep, deep blue of the spring . . . “It was hard to leave them. But I wanted to all my life.” There was the paradox her love was built on. “I wanted to see things outside home. Seemed worth doing, seeing what else there was in the world to see, then having my beautiful place to come home to. When my friends and I were kids, we did a lot of little short trips, but we never ever went far enough that I was tired of wanderin’.” She exhaled. “And lately, nobody had a mind to wander anymore. All my friends were settling into their trades, havin’ babies, and I wanted those things, but . . . I wanted to see the ocean more.”

He stayed silent, looking her in the eye, and by the Moon wasn’t it nice to be listened to. She exhaled into the silence. “And I was sick of puttin’ up with my half-brother.”

A knowing smile crossed his face, like he’d heard what he was waiting to hear. “Family can be difficult. I do find my father easier to love from the distance of the field,” he said, tucking his hands behind his head. “What did your brother do?”

Sana pursed her lips. “I wasn’t supposed to be at his night-fire more than a month,” she muttered. “When our sister took her daughter to her father’s night-fire and my brother’s lady left him, I promised I’d make sure he had drinking water until he’d built his own distiller. But he kept putting off building the distiller, kept inviting more and more of his friends over, and I got caught in gettin’ water every evening for so many people, and none of them liked me.”

“Not even your brother?” Iroh asked.

“He’d be the first to remind you we’re half siblings,” Sana said. “Pa was a waterbender. None of my brothers and sisters are. Got a few nieces and nephews that are, though. I think everyone thought it was supposed to skip a generation. I think they thought when Pa got with my Earth Kingdom Ma it’d skip my branch of the family entirely. But here I am.” 

She rolled onto her back to look at the blue, blue sky through the hole in the roof of the grotto.

“The nights just kept going by and I had to spend them with all these people who didn’t want me to be the only waterbender they could get,” she said. “I got to thinkin’ about how Pa passed. How one day he was fine, and then one day he wasn’t, how it came on so sudden but it was still so slow - ” She waited for Iroh to change the subject, tell her she was getting too dark. When she glanced over he was still looking at her, offering her silence. “He got stupid before anything. His mind not workin’ right. Then the headaches started. One day, he got one that never ended. By the end he was just pain. That’s all he was - in pain. He couldn’t even speak to us but a minute or two of the day. And it still took him a week like that to die.” She inhaled, exhaled. “What if I went the same way, I thought? What if tomorrow, I woke up with the headache that never ended, and all the rest of my life was just pain surrounded by people I didn’t like? Once that became all I could think about . . . It was harder to stay than to go.”

_And the current in the swamp got stronger and stronger, never showing her a vision, never giving her the guidance it gave so easily to Tei and Idia and Mothmouse, just threatening every day a little more to sweep her off her feet._

_Westward. Oceanward._

_Here._

She stared at the sky for a moment. When she looked back over, Iroh was still paying attention to her.

He registered the end of her story with a half smile, reached out and put his hand on hers, resting on her sternum. “I’d have left too,” he said.

She closed her hand around his. “Oh yeah? You’d break a promise to your own brother, leave him to gather his water the hard way?”

He chuckled. “It might give him time to build some character.”

She had to laugh too, but softly. Back home Jiu was telling anyone who’d listen what a faithless bitch she was, his half-loyal half-sister, and with all his friends having to gather their own water he doubtless had a very receptive audience.

“Your father’s death left a great impact on you,” he commented, sympathetic in her silence. She leaned into the sympathy.

“I was young. Awful things shape you when you’re young.”

“If my mother had died when I had been that young, I would be a very different person,” Iroh agreed. “I’d be a lesser bender, if nothing else.”

“That was a big part of it, all my time growin’ up,” Sana said, rolling on her side to be a little closer to him and his sympathy. “I had good teachers, but none of ‘em were my pa, you know? I’m so jealous of your time with your ma.” She paused. “I know this is all heavy stuff,” she said, seeing his grief closer than hers was. “Thank you for listening.”

“I should be thanking you. My father is not exactly the king of speaking long about feelings, and my brother is so young he’ll never know our mother well enough to miss her.” He squeezed her hand. “It’s nice to talk about her again.”

“It does help, don’t it?”

He ran his thumb along the back of her hand, the soothing touch pulling her out of the darkness of death. “Well, I’m sorry that your home life became too unpleasant to stand, but I have to say, I am very happy you left.”

She smiled. “Lucky for you, wasn’t it?”

“It was.” She felt it had been lucky for her, too, the way her hand felt so warm in his. “Destiny did me a favor, sending you.”

She sat up, snorting with laughter. “Oh, it’s destiny that brought us here? Do you say that to all the ladies you’re trapped on a desert island with?”

“So far just the one,” Iroh said, sitting up beside her. “Tell you what - in my gratitude for your help, I’ll come up with something else to say to the next woman who saves my life at sea.”

He touched her chin gently, just brushing his thumb over the edge of her bottom lip, and she leaned in for a kiss.

 _Just the one,_ she thought. Then, _all right, maybe two._

“I want to have done something worth celebrating by sunset,” Iroh said, breaking the kiss before she could commit to a third. “Let’s get back to work. If I can’t swim out of here by the end of the day, it won’t be for lack of trying.”

“But it’s much easier to get out than it is to get back in,” Sana said, wryly, as she stood up, eager to get back in the water.

“Well.” Iroh rolled his broad shoulders, which just made Sana want to put her hands back on them - “Then I’ll just go on being grateful I’ve got a master waterbender from the far secret corners of the world here to keep me alive in it.”

 _It would have been worth it to have left home just to see the ocean,_ Sana thought. And yet here the world was, giving her even more reasons to be so glad she’d come all this way.


	10. I Build My Life Like a Castle in the Sand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's title is from Where I Wanna Be - by A R I Z O N A. That, and We Rise - by San Holo, are this chapter's mini-playlist.
> 
> Warnings in this chapter for descriptions of animal violence (specifically killer whale predation on whales, bottlenose dolphin aggression against other cetaceans), seal hunting by humans, and some more racist and imperialist arguments.

Chapter 10

I Build My Life Like a Castle in the Sand

Time, not depth, turned out to be the trick.

Sana tied a line to a heavy stone and dropped it into the center of the grotto, with a float vest tied to the surface end for Iroh to hang onto while resting between dives. He dove each time to the limit of his depth, pulling himself down the line arm over arm and then hanging onto the line, upside down, waiting for Sana to tap his foot and alert him he'd hit a new time record. He found that at whatever depth he pulled himself to the point where his ears stopped clearing, hanging there in the knowledge that he still had time to wait gave him space to try his ears again, and again, until they did clear a little more, and a little more depth became possible.

Within an hour, Iroh had made it the five fathoms down. After passing the five fathom mark, deeper water was easier to reach, his ears needing smaller adjustments. He touched the sandy bottom of the grotto only five attempts later.

He had come to realize over the day that while Sana naturally floated at the surface with her face gently above the surface, he did not actually sink at the surface as he thought he did, slowly and inevitably downward. Instead, his natural flotation hovered him at an inconvenient depth which kept his nose below the surface of the water - but it held him there, unsinking, unless he exhaled, at which point he dipped below the surface - but simply hung there, suspended without dropping to the bottom of the sea.

Below the five fathoms, though, he did sink - naturally, easily, slowly, like a big leaf drifting downward. It was not the dramatic plunge he'd dreaded when first he held still in the water and let Sana see where his body suspended him. It spared him effort, once he realized that past that depth, he could simply let his hands fall to the side and glide downward, saving breath for when he tucked himself into a lotus position on the sand.

Sana, by contrast, was buoyant all the way to the sandy floor of the grotto. She hovered above him with her hand on the dive line, gently hanging in place and watching him for distress. To reach the depth she'd plunged herself down with waterbending, a wide sweep of her arms pulling water from in front of her directly behind her, bulging the surface of the sea slightly and shooting her downward as she and the water above rushed to fill the void below.

On the seafloor, with his breath held longer than he had ever expected to hold his breath at one time, Iroh sat on the sand and found himself completely weighed down by the water. Above, sunlight sparkled through the distant surface and filled the blue with shifting beams, fish glittering through the light in the forest of coral growing up the walls of the grotto. Iroh wondered if any firebender had ever sat in such a place. He wondered if any firebender would ever believe him when he said he had.

The saltwater current burned Iroh's eyes, but he'd gotten so used to the feeling after the passing of the day that he kept his eyes open, looking to the mouth of the grotto. He imagined walking across this sand out of it, and back into it too, free to leave this comfortable containment at any time, to swim the quarter mile back to a beach where he would greet the sunrise in his usual fashion - perhaps not tomorrow, but hopefully the day after. His lungs began their convulsions inward, the signal that he now knew was not the immediate need to breathe, but the signal that breath would be very welcome, very soon.

Iroh shifted into a squat and pushed up from the sand, marveling at the distance underwater that the jump took him, the way he felt suspended at the end of it instead of plunging back down as he had feared. He fisherfrog-kicked surfaceward as Sana had taught him to, picking up speed as he passed the 5 fathom mark and realized his body was buoyant again, when he had not thought of himself as buoyant until he felt what true nonbuoyancy was. He broke through the surface and threw his arms over the float vest, sucking in deep full lungfuls of air and holding onto them for a flash of a second, exhaling in puffs and inhaling deep and sharp again. Sana surfaced next to him, breathing less heavily.

"You did it!"

"I did!" Iroh panted, clinging to the floatvest.

"Are you tired enough for one day?" Sana asked. "We can keep drilling tomorrow."

"No." He gasped a few times. "I'm not tired." He'd pass out without a second thought as soon as the sun had set, but he so wanted to be ready to leave the grotto himself in the morning. "I mean to keep going."

So they did. Down, and up, and down again, until Iroh was swimming along the floor of the grotto, feeling the current out, realizing that the swim took so much less time than he'd visualized, and he burst out into the open ocean with Sana on his tail long before sunset.

They toasted his victory with a long kiss, underwater, as when Iroh held on to Sana his lesser buoyancy dragged even her underwater. "Isn't it odd," he pointed out when they separated and burst to the surface for breaths, "how much the water wants to hold you up?" he understood now, having watched Sana require waterbending just to get herself to stop bobbing back to the surface, while he could simply glide down on a few big sweeps of his arms and a fisherfrog kick, why she'd said he'd be good at diving. "I would never have thought a firebender might have an easier time than someone born in a watertribe of getting anything accomplished in the water, but it always forces you back up."

"Give me a break!" Sana objected, moving his hands to her full hips, the softness of her belly layered over her strong core. She rested her own hands on his powerfully muscled shoulders, his arms dense from a lifetime of firebending, a career of field rations and constant activity. "Maybe if I had biceps the size of melons, I'd sink easier. You haven't exactly objected to my buoyancy."

Iroh reached around her hips to dig his fingers into said buoyancy. "I wasn't going to."

They dipped above and below the surface in kissing until the sunset was too close. Sana spun up a waterspout that lifted them to the top of the cliff, where they expended the last energy left over from the day in enjoying each other's company, with a little time left over to look for a green flash that again did not come.

~~~~

The days became only more idyllic as the moon grew. Their natural rhythms complemented each other as Iroh woke before Sana each morning, with time for himself to swim to the beach, greet the sun with his firebending practice, and return to the grotto with some freshly caught or freshly gathered breakfast in time for Sana to wake up. She in her turn took care of an evening meal before sunset, and was up after he had passed contentedly into sleep, waterbending as the moon grew fuller each night, its light falling into the grotto, onto the tree and her practice.

Their shelter was comforting, secure, lovely, their food plentiful. Even the walks they had to take a little bit further each day to find fruit were pleasant. They slept well, ate well, and had nothing to do in between meals but to entertain themselves.

There was an abundance of amusement on the island, for a pair of well fed young athletes such as they were. Iroh had discovered that the cliffs, even with their sharp erosion, had hand and footholds perpetually smoothed by the water, and he made a game of trying to climb the cliffs by himself while Sana studied the macawphins that sheltered in the bay during the day. The cliffs cast long shadows out over the water all through the morning, leaving him safe to pass his time without the risk of another terrible burn, whether he clung to a cliffside or floated in the water. The climbing was invigorating and challenging, as was the inevitable constant falling into the water below as Iroh failed time and again to reach the top, occasionally cutting his hands or feet on the rough limestone, and simply returning to the practice after Sana healed his cuts. It was incredible how much caution was lifted from one's shoulders with a medic capable of instantaneous healing right nearby, and the climbing worked muscles and demanded flexibility he had never considered needed working, a placeholder for the running he didn't feel like doing on the island, and an improvement of a skill he might one day find useful in the field. Sana joined him in climbing once in a while, but her focus on the macawphins only grew more intense with exposure to them.

Iroh understood her fascination intellectually. She was trying to learn from the macawphins as he had once learned from the dragons, albeit on a much more mundane level. The macawphins would never reveal to her secrets to match the phenomenal beauty of the Masters' true fire, but they still surely held secrets that she had not been able to learn in her landlocked upbringing, wherever a landlocked waterbending tribe could possibly be found. He hung from halfway up the cliffside, eyes on Sana as she floated near to a passing crowd of macawphins. The animals leaped out of the water like darts, spread their gliding fins and soared several bodylengths distance over the surface of the water before slipping beneath the waves again. Sana struggled to swim fast enough to keep up with them.

Iroh idly considered the bodies of water he knew existed in the Earth Kingdom as he watched her struggle. The rivers and lakes near Ba Sing Se could have hosted water tribes on their banks, but not secretly. They were far too well occupied already, and Sana was so unrefined compared even to Earth Kingdom peasants that close to the outer ring of the city. Whatever body of water a whole tribe sustained themselves at, doubtless it was large, and one or several rivers lead to or from it. He wouldn't have a hard time discovering her tribe, finding her again after they parted ways, if he wanted to.

He held on with one hand, then the other, shaking fatigue out of his hands, wondering if he did want to find Sana after they parted ways. He'd buy a great deal of his father's regard by locating a third water tribe. And yet, he wondered if that third water tribe was worth his father's time at all. The tribe was likely too small and too reclusive to bother with being an ally to the Earth Kingdom against the Fire Nation, therefore expending the resources to track and confine them would be a mis-allocation of force better expended against active Earth Kingdom combatants.

Iroh would never breathe a hint of it to Azulon, but his father's choice to concentrate his life against the Southern Water Tribe was like paying off one small debt to free up more funds towards a massive one. Azulon in his brilliance and his might had achieved his conquest, but left the Earth Kingdom, with its diverse and stubborn population, with its impenetrable stronghold capitol, the true bulk of the war to his son. Not because Azulon was weak or cowardly, not because Azulon wanted the easy glory of a decisive but simple win, but because Azulon understood the strategic advantage of winnowing the true enemy's support away before coming directly for them. With the south devastated, the Nothern Water Tribe was on the verge of withdrawing their support for their Earth Kingdom allies. They would, if Iroh's intelligence was correct, wall themselves off from the rest of the world in a few years in their fortresses of cold solitude, desperate to avoid the defeat that had befallen their sister tribe. When the Earth Kingdom fell, the Northern Water Tribe would stand no chance against the expanded might of the Fire Nation.

The North was still a force to keep in mind, but they were retreating slowly. An isolated, disorganized tribe such as Sana's could not pose a real threat, offer support to the north, and would likely be wiped away easily even if they allied with the Earth Kingdom. Sana herself might prove an ally in keeping her tribe from posing any hazard to the Fire Nation's campaign in the Earth Kingdom, whether she knew it or not, if she took back tales about the destruction of the south, the inhospitality of the North, and the might of the Fire Nation through her understanding of his resourcefulness and power. Whether she knew that she gave him an advantage or not, she was likely to tell her friends and her family to stay quiet, stay hidden, keep their noses down lest the Fire Nation blot them out like a man might flick a fly from the page of a scroll as he studied it.

They could be permitted to be secret, wherever they lived in their lack of influence. But he wanted to know where their secret hideout was anyway. He wanted the information, in case there were more waterbenders in Sana's tribe than he estimated, in case she were merely uniquely impoverished among her people, in case he had to find her again with an emergency need for a healer and emotional ties of a woman who was fond of him to call on.

His forearms were tight with the tension of holding his weight up. He pushed off from the wall and plunged into the sea below, startling some macawphins as they passed by. When he opened his eyes to watch them vanish underwater, Sana tumbled clumsily into view, bursting to the surface and snorting water out of her nose with unattractive noises.

"Are you all right?" Iroh called, swimming over to her as she inhaled.

"Yes! Fine!" Sana insisted, clearing her nose again. "Just turned my head the wrong way while trying my kick. Again."

"Do the macawphins not measure up as tutors?" he asked, treading water as Sana brushed her face clear.

"No, I'm the bad student," Sana insisted. "You wouldn't believe how close they let me get. I really think they understand that I'm trying to learn from them," she said, her voice full of wonder, her mouth wide with her smile. "Are you hungry? I'm starving."

They swam back into the grotto, Sana helping Iroh through the entrance hold with a countercurrent to the one that was always such a challenge not to be kept out by. Over parrotfish that had been marinating in calamansi in a bowl of ice since Sana awoke, she went on about her experience with the sea creatures, her enthusiasm boundless. "They don't avoid me at all anymore. A foxphin let me touch it this morning -"

"You got that close to a foxphin?" Iroh had seen a few of the larger creatures in amongst the macawphins, brilliantly orange and silver compared to the macawphins with their red, yellow, and blue, and so much larger than the smaller acrobats, with their wide-soaring gliding wings. The foxphins tended to travel in pairs or trios, compared to the macawphins large schools, and Iroh had seen three once from the deck of a ship tearing a leatherback porpoise apart like city panthers toying with a mousephant. The little leatherback porpoise had been so pitifully beaten that he'd nearly struck it with lightning to mercy kill it, before one of the foxphins dragged it down to its likely death and out of the reach of his mercy kill. "They're big enough to drown you if they wanted," he pointed out.

"They're more aggressive than the macawphins, but if I give them space they give me space," Sana insisted, brushing off his concern. He considered telling her about the poor porpoise - "One likes me. He let me hold onto his dorsal fin as he swam -"

She was so excited by this development that he held back on his porpoise story. Perhaps he would bring his concerns up when they weren't in the open water, when Sana was not glowing with the thrill of learning from an inhuman master.

She saw his lack of enthusiasm. "Don't worry," she sighed. "Even in the north they said I was taking stupid risks, getting in the water with the wolfwhales -"

"You got in that water?" Iroh cut in. "Let alone with wolfwhales?" This tropical sea was pleasant to float in on a hot day, but Iroh could not imagine falling in the arctic water and not dying immediately without the heat of firebending to keep off the chill, and then to add wolfwhales into the equation -

"They weren't all that interested in me," Sana said, waving this off as if the wolfwhales were not five times the size of foxphins and perhaps five thousand times as aggressive with their prey. Once on their way north, their ship had passed the carcass of a mantawhale, its skin peeled off in strips, wolfwhales jostling each other to get into the dead whale's mouth to eat its tongue. "They're very smart," Sana insisted, while Iroh fought back nausea at the memory of the carnage. "They're so beautiful to see underwater. That striking white and black, and the way they howl their songs -"

Her eyes were sparkling with transcendence, but Iroh could barely keep his appetite with the memory of the peeled mantawhale.

Sana's enthusiasm dimmed as he failed to come up with any supporting question. "Well," she sighed, "Learning from the things that live in the ocean is wonderful to me, even if it's not a worthwhile way to spend my time. And if I'm the only one who cares to do it - what's wrong with doing it, anyway?" she sighed. "What's wrong with finding something wonderful in the world and following it as hard as you can?"

"Who's told you it's not worthwhile?" Iroh asked. It was probably a foolish use of her time, considering the way firebender children were expected to be done chasing salamanders and learning what little they could from the mundane creatures of their element by the time they entered formal schooling, but he was curious what water tribespeople considered worthwhile uses of time. "The northern tribe?"

"Who else? Nobody back home even knows wolfwhales except in stories," Sana said. "We didn't even have stories about the elephant whales. You wouldn't believe what it feels like to be in the water with an elephant whale," she said, her voice awed again.

An elephant whale had rammed and sunk a Gem-class vessel testing explosives offshore when Iroh was 10 years old. Only one sailor had survived to tell the tale. The rest of the sailors likely hadn't found the transcendence in being in the water with the beast that Sana described. "I can only imagine," he said, charitably.

"I mean it. When you understand how massive they truly are, when you're suspended in that blue that has no end, when you swim down deep enough that the surface is as blue as the depths and they're there looking at you - their eyes are the size of my head!" Sana exclaimed, her enthusiasm only rising. "I swear they are people in there, you can see it in the way they pause to look at you - " she paused, her mood ebbing as Iroh remained unmoved. "I sound crazy, don't I."

"Perhaps a touch," Iroh said, gently, as Sana sighed again.

"I just can't seem to get anybody else to understand how wonderful it is, to be that deep with them. I've seen things that other people aren't trying to see, been places they aren't trying to go, but maybe there's something to be discovered there. Maybe it's just the peace of blue that never ends."

She was drifting poetic, gentle joy back in her tone at the endlessness of the ocean. The thought of being that deep in endless sea made Iroh feel cold and claustrophobic.

"So in the Northern tribe, you studied healing and you swam with wolfwhales." It made sense to him for a waterbender to have or be developing techniques to stay alive in freezing cold water, if no other part of it made sense. "What else did you do?"

"Well - uh -" Sana winced. "Technically I got engaged."

The fragment of a story already promised to be hilarious. "You technically got engaged?"

"It was an accident!"

"How do you get engaged on accident?" He was engaged, of course, but that had been so absolutely not on accident, the forms already signed in triplicate before he was old enough to shave and his fiance was old enough to walk.

Sana looked reluctant, but once she began speaking, the story tumbled out of her like a waterfall. "I knew that some of the locals were coming around to the idea of marryin' me into one of the Northern families, but I didn't know what gettin' engaged even looked like in the North. When we get married in my tribe, we just throw a party and that's good enough for everyone, but up north -" she rolled her eyes. "So there was this one fella, and he was a hunter. The aunties were convinced we'd make a good match, but I went out walkin' with him a few times and all he could talk about was clubbing seals." She set her hand on her chin. "It's an important job, but it was the only thing he could talk about, and he never stopped talking! It was amazing, really, because there's not that much different that goes on between seal hunts, right? You walk out on the ice, you find a seal hauled out, you sneak up behind it, you club it - but he had at least a hundred variations on that story! Never asked me a thing about my home, or my plans, did I want kids or not, had I been anywhere fun on the way North, but I think I could tell you every moment of his life from birth to the time I left. I just couldn't believe someone with so little to talk about could find so many words to tell it with. I told the aunties it wasn't gonna happen, but they kept on sellin' him to me. One day we're walking and he gets all serious, pulls out this necklace, all 'I made this for you,' and it was pretty, you know? So I said thanks, and he said, 'so you accept,' and I didn't know what he meant so I said 'sure, it's a nice necklace,' but he meant did I accept him to marry and nobody told me so until I'd been wearing the damn necklace for two days! Two days and I had no idea why all the aunties were so excited I had it and none of the men would talk to me at all! It was awful when I gave it back -" she dragged her hands down her face at the memory. "He was so angry and embarrassed. I was just embarrassed. The aunties stopped talking to me too. All the girls but the little ones I was learnin' in the healin' hut with stopped talking to me. When they started talking again it was to say I could apologize to him real nice and maybe if I was nice enough for a while he'd consider puttin' the engagement back on - I left the north that night." She glanced at Iroh as he chuckled. "It ain't funny! I humiliated the man and I didn't even mean to."

"Well his loss is my gain," Iroh said, chuckling. "Think if it'd taken you three days to figure it out, not two. Might we have missed each other, might I be fishfood now, instead of the other way around?"

"Well, when you put it like that." Sana looked downward, but she smiled again. "I don't think I'll ever go back," she said, but with a touch of regret in her tone. "There's so much about healing I'll never learn, but you've never been in a colder room than a Northern Water Tribe hut when you've shamed their son and been unladylike and bad at healing the whole time. I really hoped when I went north that we'd be sharing with each other, my style, our tribe's customs, and theirs, but they only wanted me to learn their way and - and that was it. We got this technique for keepin' warm submerged in cold water and I was advancing it so much, but they weren't interested -"

Iroh filed away a mental note to ask about that technique later. "You would think, with the allies in the Earth Kingdom they have to protect, that they'd be eager to have any able-bodied fighter they could get. We have no such compulsions about turning down female firebenders in our service."

"How nice for them," Sana said, but she said it so dryly, as one who could not possibly be appreciative enough of fire nation military resourcefulness and organization. "It wasn't even that they didn't want me to fight," she went on - "they didn't want me to do anything but one kind of waterbending, and if I wasn't good at it then it didn't matter what else I was good at. Not even if it meant I could hop in the freezing water and come out alive after bein' in longer than it took to get out and get dried, even if it meant I could get in the water to go down after a seal - I hoped I could go there and share and be shared with, but they were so rigid." She frowned. "Like ice. Like my tribe had nothing worth learning, like everything they needed they already knew and it was my job to earn the sliver of it they thought was for me, even if I wasn't good at it. No wonder my ancestors left." She sighed a little, as Iroh snatched up this new fragment of information. Her tribe had split from the north. Where was a tribe that split from the north likely to have gone, if not all the way to the south pole? "So what do you do when your family don't like you, and your far-off kin ain't your people, and no matter where you go there ain't nobody who cares about the things you care about?"

 _Put on a mask, and figure out how to accomplish what's asked of you,_ Iroh thought, but didn't say, thinking of every time he'd felt misunderstood, or deliberately misrepresented himself to put someone else off their guard, or to get what he needed from them. _Not everyone has so few obligations that they can just run away from feeling put-upon_.

The passive attitude she described would have gotten her nowhere in the Fire Nation any more than it had gotten her all but exiled from the north, but then, he could not think poorly of her for simply flowing where destiny needed her to be. She could hardly be blamed for acting like water seeking low ground, given the passiveness of her element, given that her birth obligations had been to a people deeply unworthy compared to his. "Make your own way in the world, I guess," he said, guessing that this was what she wanted to hear, given that it was what she had done.

"Yeah, so did I." Sana looked out over the sea, brushing her hair back over her ear. "Anyway, I think I found where I ought to be, even if there's nobody else who gets - all of this." She gestured to the ocean. "In the north they kept telling me 'you could be a passable waterbender, or you could give birth to many strong waterbending sons -'" she gagged on her words. "Don't get me wrong, I want kids, but not before I saw the world I was bringin' em into myself. I can't even think about it, watching my sons all learn to bend and go out in the world while I had to just . . . stay home and not do either of those things, not even bend with them."

Iroh thought of his mother, her return from the field to the honor and glory of life as the Fire Lady, the time she had spent joyfully teaching him their shared art, the utter waste it would have been not to permit her to master her fire in every way it could be mastered. He felt a little smug about it. He couldn't criticize Sana too much for her passive escapism. The cold north was hardly the land of plenty and culture that the Fire Nation offered women, benders and otherwise, who chose to mother sons in it, and no woman had ever been summoned out of the field to a greater honor than his mother had been. "You might find it more appealing when you've had your fill of wandering," he said, idly, thinking that one day the sea might grow lonely, the storms harsh, the ocean cold for a woman like Sana who, torn in a million directions by her yearning, nevertheless clearly yearned for human connection. She looked at him with her brows drawn in near offense. "My mother enjoyed her married homelife, after all," he said, "and she had more tales of life in the field than I think you've had time to make yet."

"Your mother traveled?"

"More than traveled, she was a captain in the army," Iroh said, proud. "We have more faith in our women than the northern tribe has in you. A woman may one day even become a general in the Fire Nation. My mother would have certainly become one."

"Would have but what?"

"But for her marriage to my father." Ilah, with her tactical wisdom, her firebending skill, her great knack for diplomacy, would have laid waste to the Earth Kingdom as a general, but still been wasted in any other position but as the Fire Lady. "Perhaps one day teaching your sons will be more rewarding than you expect now," he went on. The way his mother had never been more lit up, more alive, than when they played in their private lessons, than when he accomplished new feats and attained new mastery under her training, still filled him up with warmth to remember. Yet again he pitied his baby brother, so overflowing with talent, yet sure to suffer for not having the teacher he had. "My mother loved teaching me. I loved learning from her."

As Sana's awe over the sea had failed to impact him, his nostalgia failed to impress her. "She must've been deeply in love, to leave the field for - why are you laughing?"

"Are marriages all love matches where you come from?" Iroh asked. He contained his snickering. No wonder her tribe was so backwoods and powerless. "No. Their marriage was arranged. Her deeds in the field earned her quite a higher match than she would have had if she'd simply stayed a minor noblewoman at home."

Sana stayed confused. "Oh." She looked blankly into the water. "I suppose she must have been very tired of the soldiering by then."

"Not at all. She spoke so fondly of her time in the field. I looked forward to mine, hearing her stories. She worked hard to prove herself and get her commission and her position in the field, and it was that determination and drive that earned her the honor of a marriage proposal as high as to my father."

"Could she have refused him?"

Iroh just laughed again.

Sana covered her mouth. "That poor woman."

Sana's unexpected pity flooded Iroh's warm nostalgia like cold water.

His voice was tight as he asked, "What reason do you have to pity her?"

"Well," Sana looked at him, cautious. "She worked hard for her job, and then she had to leave it to marry someone she'd never met -"

"You are mistaken." His voice was a sharp snap. Sana had clearly matched her image of his mother's life to the dismal cold servitude of motherhood in the north, that she would have been trapped in if the Northern Water Tribe had any true power over her. The thought of matching his golden and warm memories of Ilah's teaching, and her reminiscing, threatened to leech the gold out of them, and the prospect infuriated him. "My mother was deeply honored by my father's proposal. She was honored to accept her new station."

His own heat felt very appropriate, but Sana looked surprised.

"I don't mean to insult your pa -"

"You are incapable of giving him insult," Iroh snapped.

Her surprise turned to confusion, turned to a little hurt, turned to something nearly anger.

"I'm sorry," she said, but her hands were on her hips, "but I don't think maybe you've thought about all that from your ma's perspective -"

"You don't understand. I wouldn't expect you to." He could not tell this woman how audacious her insult was, to speak of the Fire Lord as if his proposal, as if the position he'd given Ilah were merely to be a broodmare. "Your culture would turn you into a barefoot and pregnant housekeeper, but my mother -"

"Hold on," Sana cut in. "My people don't -"

"The northern tribe then. You think their way of restricting a woman to the birthing hut is the same for the women of the Fire Nation, but you are -"

"The women of the north don't -"

He did not allow himself to be interrupted. "You have no idea the status, the honor of a woman in the Fire Nation marrying as noble as my mother did. Her responsibilities and her honors were greater than any woman on the ice could ever be expected to fulfill, and that is the Fire Nation's strength and the Northern tribe's failing."

He could not tell her the height of nobility that Ilah obtained, could not possibly explain to her EXACTLY how much more honorable being Fire Lady was than being even a captain as Ilah had been, and it boiled at him, not to be able to clarify.

Sana simply still looked irrationally indignant. "Well would you wanna leave the field forever just to marry someone you'd never met?"

"One day I will marry someone I've never met, and one day I will leave the field to take over my father's position, as is my duty as his honorable son. As my mother's duty was to become my mother. We do not have the luxury of simply roaming where we want, but we are better for it," Iroh snapped.

Sana's eyes widened. "Better than who, exactly?"

"It is something every Fire Nation citizen understands, but I cannot force you to understand it."

"I just -"

"I think this conversation should be over," Iroh said, plainly, and Sana opened her mouth to object -

But she shut it again, and took a deep breath.

"I think maybe that's so," she said, with an exhale. "Can't explain myself to someone who don't wanna listen."

She stood up and jumped into the sea. She didn't surface inside the grotto again.

Bristling with frustration, Iroh sat and eyed the water where Sana had disappeared, the grotto suddenly feeling enclosed to the point of being claustrophobic, the waves very loud in the echoing chamber. No one had ever insulted his mother or his father so to his face - no one would have dared, when the price was as high as it would have been back home. He could have challenged Sana to a duel over the slight on his mother's honor, implying she had been anything less than deeply honored and glad to serve as the Fire Lady, over the insult to his father's position as if marriage to him was a downgrade from an officer's commission.

He stalked up to the top of the rock in the center of the grotto, and inhaled deeply to unleash a breath of fire, a massive cloud that touched the back wall of the grotto, but only blackened the stone without lighting anything. The harmless release of his anger eased his tension, and he did it again, breathing between the complete exhalations as he breathed between deep dives.

The grotto was very, very quiet when he stopped, as if even the sea had laid down. Indeed it was almost still, barely flowing over the lower stones up to the sandbank, and Iroh felt as if an invisible crowd had suddenly turned all their silent eyes upon him.

He looked back to the plumeria tree, where the silvery spirit energy still flowed, though slower than he had ever seen it.

 _She is just a peasant from some backwater tribe, literally,_ Iroh thought, and the reminder that Sana lacked all context for honor settled him somewhat.

Of course no Fire Nation citizen would give such direct insult. They knew better. A woman who was attractive and helpful and fun, but nevertheless, deeply uneducated and unrefined, would stumble over such an insult. Fortunate for her that he was more patient than many of the other Fire Nationals he knew, understanding that a pretty face could not be unburned.

Iroh took another deep breath, and bowed to the tree. "That was uncouth of me," he said. This was a place where the energetic nature of water reigned supreme, and he had just filled it briefly with the element that was in its direct opposition. A threatening gesture in a gentle, recessive place. "I offer my apology."

He sat on the sand before the plumeria to meditate, offering his calm up as demonstration of his reticence.

~~~~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: It's noteworthy to me that in a deliberately feminist show like A:tLA, we only ever see women in uniform (aside form the Kyoshi warriors) in the Fire Nation. I don't think that's a great feminist accomplishment for the Fire Nation, the way Iroh does here, but a symptom of the Fire Nation needing endless bodies for an endless campaign of pointless violence on the rest of the world. Maybe one day I'll write a short from Ilah's perspective upon receiving a proposal in the form of unrefusable military orders, and how horrifying I imagine that being. A culture where the Fire Lord is held up as unquestionable forced her to receive those orders gracefully, but even though it didn't break her loyalty to imperialism, I see her reaction as much less enthusiastic than Iroh was content until this argument to assume. Iroh's comments and thoughts on the Northern Water Tribe are extremely racist too, and patronizing towards the women who flourish there. I wish we had gotten more perspectives from Northern Water Tribe women in the show (and heard from any Foggy Swamp women . . . clearly).


End file.
